A new study shows that negative stereotypes about learning can impact, not just the students’ performance, but their actual ability to learn.
If you want to know why I don’t find it amusing to perpetuate negative stereotypes about girls and math, this pretty much sums it up:
“(The present study) points to the importance of creating environments that reduce the impact of stereotype threat during mathematical skill acquisition by women,” the authors concluded in their PNAS article. “If creating such an environment is not done, the learning deficits that result could well be cumulative, causing problems that continually worsen as development proceeds.
When you portray girls as being bad at math, you might actually be making them bad at math.
It’s not just math and it’s not just girls, of course, but that girls and math was the chosen example for this article is pretty telling. Do people really think we’re in a post-sexist society, where female-deprecating humor is suddenly, magically, not harmful?
It’s findings like this that make me come back to still being a supporter of single-sex education in the middle and high school years. It can be done badly, yes, but when it’s done right, it offers such a powerful antidote to harmful attitudes.
Okay, more from me. I discovered the Online School for Girls today. Multivariable calculus! Diff Eq! Women in Art and Literature! AP courses! Color me one happy mama-that’s-a-girls’-school-alumna.
Through school I’d always hear “You can be good at math, even though you’re a girl”. I hate that attitude, as if being a girl is crippling in the first place. When you put in all this extra effort to try and cover up the stereotype, it’s more obvious than ever that it’s there. It’s like trying to clean a stain on a carpet, only to end up with a bleached spot where the stain once was. You know there was a mess there once!
My father’s attitude was always that he didn’t need to tell me that I could be good at math, because.. well, duh, of course I could. He already told me that I could do anything, why did he need to specifically emphasise math? He really believed it, and you could tell in his attitude.
I am now majoring in Honours Combinatorics and Optimization, with a minor in Physics and a minor in Pure Math at university.