Hi! I have made my way
back to Croatia and I am writing from my grandmother’s house, a couple meters
away from the beach in unbearable heat. The post below is another girl rant
pointed at the state in academia today and based on my observations in not only
studying but also teaching in the fields
of mathematics and physics which are both heavily male dominated. It is
something that I feel strongly about and that I think is rather important
overall and hopefully I am not the only one that feels that way.
As I have mentioned before, I worked in a mathematics
program for gifted 9th and 10th graders for a part of the
summer and therefore had the chance no to only practice my teaching but also
gain an insight in how demographics of all sorts affect the selection and
treatment of participants in educational programs of this kind. The criteria
were many and most of them were rather reasonable. For instance, we would not accept
a lot of students from one school and very little from some other and we
definitely tried to keep the diversity high. One other thing that seems to be a
burning question in mathematics in general was accepting women. The acceptance
in the program was very fair in this regard and there were more than a third of
women and the scores on the diagnostic exam that was distributed on the first
day were spread out more or less evenly, with one or two girls in each group of
scores. I guess it was not all that surprising that the top five scorers or so
were male but there was a girl in the top ten with a close score and for the
sake of fairness she was given a chance to work, in a smaller problem solving
group that met daily, with the other five students that proved to be most
competent, at least according to the diagnostic exam that the counselors came up
with. After about two weeks the girls’ mother called the head of the program
and asked for her daughter to be transferred to a lower problem solving group
because she felt uncomfortable with her current assignment. In her counselor’s
report during weekly evaluations it became evident that it was not really the
math that she was having issues with but rather her peers that were a little
more assertive, a little more loud and all male. She ended being transferred to
one of the groups with high/medium scorers and at the end of that week her new
counselor readily reported that she does indeed feel more at ease but has, at
the same time, made friends with another girl thus becoming somewhat
distracted. That behavior continued until the end of the program and despite
the skills she exhibited on that first exam, she definitely faded away from the
picture in comparison to a lot of students that seemed to have less potential
when we started but then improved in rather impressive ways.
It is confusing to me why this story had to progress this
way or why it was kind of a given that our most impressive students will end up
being almost all male. In all honesty, the group of top scorers was definitely
one where it was hard to feel comfortable if one was not something of a prodigy
but what bothers me the most is that, in the end, it was not about mathematics
as much as it was about being assertive and confident. It is disconcerting that
all other students in the group that were perhaps not as good as the one or two
kids that could actually do all the problems were not as intimidated as the girl
was and stayed in the group, learning how to be quicker and more competitive
and at the same time taking advantage of all the extra material that they were
shown as the supposedly most talented group. The issue here seems to be
primarily in the gender imbalance and I guess the fact that the girl in
question felt more comfortable and was suddenly way less shy in a group where
there were girls somewhat corroborates that. The fact that she then proceeded
to make the math and learning secondary to socializing definitely does not make
this not all that amusing anecdote sound any better.
The situation in my own group, a little lower on the scoring
scale, was a little more balanced but the attitude that some of the girls brought
to the class were still not something to rejoice about. Two of them struggled
with the material a little bit but seemed to find their lack of knowledge to be
something to bond about instead of improving upon it. After the first half of
the program they were also more than comfortable in chitchatting their way
through class and hoping that one of the other kids would volunteer to present
assigned proofs and calculations on the board. They both came in with stellar recommendation
from their teachers and yet very soon they were more interested in which
celebrities I find attractive than proving Lagrange’s theorem. The most
improved girl in the group was nothing like that but given that she came from
an art school, had an asymmetric haircut and almost matched me in wearing band t-shirts
I feel like I cannot generalize her behavior to all, generic, teenage girls
despite the fact that I liked her very much.
Even though I have long been aware of how hard and how
deeply rooted in common popular culture it is that mathematics is a male
dominated field for a reason, the final punch in the face, so to speak, came a
couple of weeks later when the assignments for the other part of the program,
the one where we worked with K-12 teachers, were being made and my request to
work with a physics class was overruled by our department head’s request that I
work with a class in which the teachers could appreciate the “feminine touch”.
Unfortunately, I am never in a position to be offended or argue because, just
like everyone else, I have to pay rent too but I was definitely shocked despite
the fact that the probably meant it as something of a compliment. At the same
time it was no surprise that most of the teachers in the said class were
frustrated middle aged women that had a hard time adding fractions despite
their long teaching careers. The first
person to algebraically solve a word problem without guessing and checking was,
again, one of the two males in the class. To make the irony worse, he was a
Spanish teacher that was thinking about picking up some math basics for his
teaching portfolio.
Now, almost a week after all of our programs have ended, I
am still somewhat disturbed by why all of this is typical. Of course, the
girls in the math major (physics is very much like that as well) do often joke
about being “bros” since everyone that we ever work with ends up being male but
I guess it is always shocking to discover the way in which this gender
imbalance seems to be taken as almost natural even before boys and girls
actually join the field. Of course, this has been a fact for quite some time and I guess most of it does stem from not only
the past social convictions about math and science but about women in general
but I do really like to think that we have surpassed that. Unfortunately it
seems that what is happening with women in math and science is nothing more
than a reflection of how deeply rooted common stereotypes about women still
are. And it is not as much about women not being intelligent as men as it is
about women being less assertive, less confident and overall more sensitive
than men. It has become an instinctive response for a girl to be uncomfortable
in a male dominated academic setting and her success seems to be measured
against such a greater plurality of criteria. One of my coworkers was almost surprised
by the fact that I do math and have something of a sense of style. It has
become a safe bet to assume that a girl that is successful in mathematics does
not necessarily look like a girl all that much or has time or desire to do
something “girly”. Girliness is somehow seen as a weakness which is something
that is way too prominent in today’s popular culture and therefore does not get
ignored even in academia, where people are supposed to be intelligent and at
least somewhat progressive. Overall the girls that end up trying to do math
seem to end up playing the typical feminine role of being weak and not loud
enough or at least distracted by clothes, boys or gossip. The academia, more
than most workplaces, paints a very outdated image of women, an image that has
been forced up on girlfolk almost forever.
Finally, I want to get back to the girls in my problem
solving group and some of the small talk we would made before 9:30 when we were
supposed to start working. One day the name Kim Kardashian randomly came up and
by some strange circumstance one of the other kids asked who she was. The answer
was that she was in a porno and has a huge bottom and is also really rich. One
of the girls remarked that she must be very smart since she has cashed in
basically everything she ever did. They talked about her the same way they
talked about Justin Beiber or any of the celebrities that they deem worthy of
mentioning. Being a loudmouth and a riot grrrl at heart I had to remark that
the fact that her fame rests on pornography and big ass kind of reflects poorly
on women everywhere. The art school student agreed with me, the other two
rolled their eyes and repeated that she’s really rich and successful. I guess Kim
Kardashian might be smart in some way but I do firmly believe that hers is not
the kind of success a 9th grader should think favorably of. At the
same time, she does fall into a certain stereotype rather nicely and probably
did not have to work on being assertive enough to show someone that she can do
group theory.
