The Calculus Diaries - Jennifer Ouellette [99]
How did I become convinced that calculus was beyond my ken? No doubt part of it stems from gender bias. There is a well-documented prejudice against women in math and science dating back thousands of years, although history gives us the rare exception, such as the plucky Sophie Germain. Such women often have been dismissed as mere statistical anomalies, but evidence is mounting that there is no innate difference in the mathematical ability of girls and boys. Any gap in performance is due primarily to sociological factors. This is a controversial statement. We would prefer to believe that the overt sexism in math and science is a thing of the past, but the reality is that these attitudes persist, even in this enlightened age.
A geometry teacher tells the entire class that the girls will probably do worse in his course because they lack spatial reasoning ability. A guidance counselor shunts female students into “practical math” classes where they learn how many ham slices each guest would need at a wedding. A physics professor insists on checking his female students’ work before they can leave the lab, yet doesn’t feel the need to check the work of his male students. A computer science professor dismisses any questions from female students as “lazy little-girl whining.” And a calculus teacher thinks it’s perfectly appropriate to measure his female students’ bodies and use those measurements as part of his volume calculations in class. One woman told of her high school math teacher who made the three female students sit in the front row, “because girls have a harder time with math than boys do.” It was really a flimsy excuse to ogle their cleavage and brush his crotch up against them suggestively during exams. “Guess which three people in that class were not about to be stuck in a basement computer lab with that dude?” she asked (rhetorically).
I never experienced anything so horrific; my math teachers were kind and, if not openly encouraging, they certainly were not discouraging or hostile, nor was I ever sexually harassed. My parents were supportive of my intellectual pursuits, if a bit bemused by my headier inclinations. Nobody ever told me explicitly that girls weren’t as good as boys at math, yet somehow I absorbed that message anyway. Carol Tavris, a cognitive psychologist and author of several popular books (The Mismeasure of Woman should be mandatory reading for young women), explained to me that there are subtle, situational social cues that seep into our consciousness as if by osmosis, even if we never encounter overt negative messaging about gender.
The phenomenon is known in psychological circles as stereotype threat, and it has been confirmed in more than a hundred scientific articles. For example, a 2007 study in Psychological Science found that female math majors who viewed a video of a conference with more men than women reported feeling less desire to participate in the conference and less of a sense of belonging than female math majors who viewed a gender-balanced version of the video. The male math majors were immune to those subtle situational cues. That’s stereotype threat in a nutshell.
These pressures are very real. Yet I can’t blame my ambivalence entirely on gender. After all, plenty of boys struggle with math, too. How we self-identify in our mathematical ability sets in at an early age and colors our perception from then on. “If ever I had an Achilles heel, mathematics would surely be it,” says Brian, who is studying to be an evolutionary biologist. Yet he keeps running afoul of the dreaded math classes and worries that his failures therein will dash his hopes of a career in science. “Nothing makes my blood run cold like an indecipherable word problem, and the very term ‘calculus’ is enough to give me nightmares,” he confesses, sounding just like many of the female students I encountered.
Tavris bemoans our fascination in the United States with the notion of innate ability as the source of this kind of negative self-identification. We are born with certain built-in