Like many people, I spat my Cheerios right back into the bowl upon reading Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ recent “provocative” questions about whether biological differences could explain the low numbers of women at the top of math and science fields. After all, I had just finished teaching about Victorians who postulated that if women expanded their brains, their ovaries would shrivel. My college students laughed, but I see now it is no laughing matter. Those Victorian doctors and President Summers were operating with the same naturalistic fallacy; they glanced around, took note of the lack of women in high places, and proposed that biological differences could explain this status quo.
I’ll tell you, I had to check to make sure I wasn’t wearing a corset! After all, current research shows not only that gender differences in math and science achievement are almost non-existent, but also that boys are the ones whose school performance is starting to lag. (To learn more, Google up the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Stanford and watch the streaming video of a recent panel discussion on this research.)
Now, I don’t expect an economist like Lawrence Summers to trouble himself with statistics, but it should alarm the rest of us that despite contrary evidence, there is still a widespread assumption that boys are more gifted than girls at math. (Ask around – most people will say this, even if they claim not to believe it themselves.) This falsehood has real consequences. Cultural beliefs and practices, not innate abilities, are the key reason there are still fewer women at the top of math and science departments.
Now, we don’t tell girls outright that they’re too stupid to do math. Instead, we tell girls in a thousand other ways that they need not do well at math, that there’s likely a subject they’ll enjoy more, or classes they’ll feel more comfortable in because there will be more girls, more female teachers and mentors. Think of the millions of girls who were handed Barbies that whined “Math class is tough!” Think of the ease with which women can confess math illiteracy, without embarrassment. I am guilty myself, joking that I’ve given up on balancing my checkbook, or that my daughter’s fifth grade math has maxed out my abilities to help with homework. Who can imagine such light-hearted dismissals of other illiteracy? “Gosh, I could barely get through the newspaper this morning!” or “Hey, smaller words please; I don’t go beyond grammar-school vocabulary.”
Female students who manage to resist these low expectations often face more overt discrimination, finding themselves the lone girl in an advanced calculus class, for example, who gets frozen out of study groups or refused mentoring. Put anyone in a chilly enough environment and see how quickly they warm to more traditional choices.
All these ideas were buzzing in my brain last week, when I chaperoned a surreal sleep-over event in South Bend’s College Football Hall of Fame with dozens of middle-school girls who were earning a Girl Scout math skills badge. The premise of the evening was all good, and our troop was psyched. They loved calculating and estimating at the different stations. Yes, it was a bit weird that all this unfolded in a museum whose images of women are limited to cheerleaders or spectators – oh, except for the jersey of kicker Katie Hnida who was at CU ... oh, wait—she was brutally harassed by her teammates and left ... ah, but that’s another story – or is it?
Anyway, my pride in our girls’ skills only faltered at the station where they figured their “own” numbers, measuring body parts with rulers ... and then stepping on a scale. Then, suddenly and dramatically, numbers were no longer friendly, something they had power over. Confident voices collapsed into whines: “I need to lose 10 pounds!” “I’m too fat!” “Too skinny!” I was reminded, then, how often numbers are used against girls. At a local high school, boys are currently harassing girls with measuring tape to record their figures—all in good fun, of course. It’s common for boys to put Post-its on girls’ lockers, rating their beauty from 1 to10. Should this keep girls from excelling at calculus? No, but it’s part of an environment that makes it easier for young women to hang with their girlfriends, to trod familiar ground.
Our math-skills evening ended with voting on a movie, and while gender-neutral choices were offered, the numbers overwhelmingly favored The Princess Diaries 2. I watched these girls in their jammies, their faces lit by images of jewels and handsome princes, boisterously singing along to “girl power” anthems like “I Always Get What I Want” and “I Decide.” The message seems powerful, but the tune was all too familiar. Are these choices really free? I wouldn’t count on it.