November 13, 2013 • 32 mins
One of history's earliest-known female mathematicians was Hypatia, a scholar and philosopher who was later stoned to death by an angry mob. While conditions have certainly improved for math-loving women today, plenty of obstacles still remain to attracting more girls and women into these numbers-driven disciplines.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from how stupp
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Caroline and I'm Christen, and today marks the final episode
in our fourth part STEMS series looking at women in
the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Yes, it's
(00:27):
math day here on Stuff Mom Never Told You. And
as we've been doing with the other STEM conversations, we've
been having, let's first look a little bit at history,
because for math in particular, it goes back quite a ways,
all the way to ancient Alexandria with Hypatia, who is
one of the earliest and certainly best known female mathematicians. Yeah,
(00:51):
her dad, Theon was one of the last members of
the Library of Alexandria, and she followed in his footstep
studying math and astronomy. Um. She didn't actually have a
happy ending though, Yeah, she was eventually beaten to death
with roofing tiles by an angry mob of religious zealots.
But thankfully things have improved. I mean we should say though,
(01:13):
that Hypatia was so notable for the work and the
scholarship that she was doing at the time, and I
don't think it was that she was a woman studying
math and astronomy that got her killed by an angry
religious mob, but more the fact that she was an
academic and academia was a bit at odds with obviously
(01:36):
religious zelotry. Indeed, while moving forward, we have Winnifred Edgerton Meryll.
She was the first American woman awarded a PhD in
math from Columbia University. But this was not as recent
as you might think. This was an eight Yeah, the
board of Columbia initially denied her request to pursue a
(01:56):
pH d, of course, but in her open to Wary
it was funny how math was described as a quote
unquote masculine pursuit of hers. And even though she had
to overcome that initial obstacle at Columbia, she did gain
a lot of notoriety at the time. She was very
well respected in her day, and important to our conversation
(02:18):
about women and diversity is Euphemia Lufton Haynes, who's the
first African American woman to earn a PhD in math
in ninety three from Catholic University. And by that time
many black women were earning masters in math. But if
you think about it, though, we have Meryl earning that
first PhD in eight six, and it's not until ninety
(02:38):
three that we have Haynes earning the same degree. And
that's something that will come up again where there is
that gap not just gender wise with math, but also
in terms of socio economic and ethnic backgrounds. But then
if we want to fast forward to today, just for
an example of a woman who's doing really amazing things
(02:59):
with math. One of the two thousand thirteen McArthur Fellows
is statistician Susan Murphy, and she collects and develops methodologies
to evaluate courses of treatment for people who are coping
with chronic and relapsing disorders, especially things like substance abuse
and depression. And she wanted to have an impact on
(03:22):
real life, kind of like what we were talking about
in the engineering episode. She really sees an altruistic way
to use statistics to improve people's lives. Man, I took
statistics in college my my freshman year, and that was
different from the other things that I enjoyed doing. Yeah,
I took a statistics course as well. It was the
(03:43):
one math class I was required to take in college
as a journalism major, and it was a summer statistics course,
students would show up in their swimsuits. They're basically on
a pool break to come to class, and yeah, it
was the imperative to save lives. I'll say that basic
(04:05):
statistics course wasn't there, but it was. It was still
neat to to learn those things. But what Murphy does
she calls them just in time adaptive interventions. We were
not learning that in my statistics course. But I will
say though, that what what she does is a neat
application of how math also intersects with psychiatry, mental health,
(04:26):
and also social programs. Absolutely. Also, speaking of those different
avenues for pursuing a career, let's look at some of
the fields that math majors enter. Those can include teaching,
finance and economics, or you know, like Murphy, you can
be a statistician. Yeah, there's also actuarial science, which is
analyzing statistics to calculate the probabilities of things like disability, unemployment, etcetera.
(04:51):
And there's also computer science that goes along with it,
operations research, cryptography, which is neat um budget and analysis, ease, ecology, UM.
And if you go into a math specialty, probably outside
of just basic teaching, you can earn a decent income
for sure. Yeah, the math specialists median income comes to thousand,
(05:16):
three hundred and fifty dollars. That was in with growth
expected in that sector. And so it makes me sad
that I you know, when I was in high school,
I looked my math teacher in the face and I
was like, I am never taking any more math. I
feel like throughout this entire STEM series, Caroline, you and
I both with our liberal arts background, both as journalism
(05:38):
majors in college, and I have spent some reflective times
thinking about what could have been if those scientific mathematic
seeds had maybe been planted and watered a little a
little more diligently back in the day. But um, if
we look though at the math pipeline, of all of
the letters in the M alphabet, the M is doing
(06:03):
the best. Yeah. Um, women earn of the math and
statistics bachelor's degrees, but they make up just twent of
math pH d s. So there's that pipeline theory again,
that you're losing women as they get older and go
through the educational system. Yeah, and similarly, women comprise only
twenty of the computer science and math profession workforce. So
(06:29):
kind of like with the situation for engineering, plenty of
bachelor's degrees, but then there's that major drop off once
you get into the real world. And unfortunately, in real
world terms, new census data shows that that is a
drop from a thirty four percent high in I wonder
(06:50):
what happened, mathematician people, Can you tell us Maybe we
need some actually real scientists to maybe dig through these
stats for us exactly. But if you look just at
mathematics careers, women's participation is actually up to fort from
just in nine. Yeah, so maybe the computer science gender
(07:10):
gap is pulling down that overall statistic um. But one
of the most persistent stereotypes that is talked about when
it comes to engaging girls in STEM is this idea
that girls aren't good at math. And so even though
there are a lot of women who are pursuing these degrees,
(07:33):
there is still this debate that circles back around to
this basic question of whether or not our brains are
as good with numbers compared to with words. Yeah, I mean,
that's a whole bunch of huey. Although I say that,
and then I'm going to admit that I was, I
(07:55):
have been terrible at math. My entire life. I had
tutors forever. Um I just I never it never really
clicked with me. But that's so in the same way
that you have a guy who can say the same thing,
who might be more of a word person. Thankfully, you
and I don't have to represent the entire population. But
(08:17):
when you average everything out and look at all of
girls versus all of boys, you see those generalizations, those
assumed gender differences start to disappear. And Elizabeth Spelki is
someone who we brought up in our first conversation on
Women and Science, and she is a Harvard psychologist and
(08:40):
h studies a lot about cognitive development in babies, and
she performed a meta analysis which found that babies as
young as six months performed equally well on adding and subtracting. Yes,
that's right. Infants can do their own very rudiment reforms
of addition and subtraction. And from those earliest stages, Spelkie says,
(09:03):
no difference between the male baby brain and the female
baby brain. So you know, we have these infants doing
all of that crazy infant math, which is which is
crazy time for me. I think that's interesting. That's adorable
and adorable I wonder what they're adding, like how many
milk bottles. I don't know why they have a high
pitched voice anyway, So boys and girls do perform equally
(09:26):
well in math until they start getting higher up in school,
basically around puberty time. Yeah, there are differences that emerge.
For instance, girls tend to be better at computation, whereas
boys tend to be better at problem solving. But when
researchers look at what's going on outside of school, they
(09:47):
think that perhaps these gender differences in our extracurricular activities
might simply be socializing and preparing boys better for math fields. Right.
And so boys were more likely to participate in stimulated activities,
conduct at home science experiments, and spend time on the
(10:07):
computer and own a calculator. I only recently ps got
rid of my t I don't let my parents hear
this podcast, um, whereas girls spent more time on math
homework itself. And that again, that's that pattern that we
see over and over and over again, and all of
these disciplines is girls are very diligent with their schoolwork, right,
(10:28):
they're very we're very good at making the grade, at
studying and sitting down and doing these things, whereas boys
might just be more actively engaged with it on more
of a comprehensive level. For instance, the percentage of girls
taking pre calculus slash analysis at was higher actually than
(10:49):
the percentage of high school guys at who were taking
those same classes. Right, And the same trend holds true
for the percent of girls taking algebra two, which was
seventy eight compared to guys. But an equal percentage of
males and females in high school took calculus at. Yeah.
In a side note, and I'm not entirely sure how
(11:11):
this necessarily relates directly to the gender gap, but there
was one finding that girls who take calculus are three
times more likely to study math in college. So I'm
not entirely sure, but I thought that was that was
kind of interesting. It's like an interesting predictor. But when
you look at the performance overall of boys and girls
(11:35):
on math exams, it's usually you know a bell curve
where you have the best in the brightest and then
the not so great at math on the on the
other end, and you have more boys populated on either
end of that math bell curve, So you have a
lot of guys, more guys in fact, who are really
(11:55):
really really really good at math. But you have more
guys than girls who are really really really really not
so good at math. So they're thinking that that high
end of the Bell curve, with that pocket of math
savants are skewing our perception to say that, oh, well,
guys just better than math math, whereas it's like, no, actually,
(12:15):
guys are just more spread out, they have more of
the math performance extremes. Interesting, well, I mean, speaking of gaps,
let's look at socio economics and ethnicity, which is a
factor that you mentioned earlier. Kristen Um studies have found
that white and Asian Pacific Islander students and those from
higher income families post significantly higher scores than their counterparts
(12:38):
who are black, Hispanic, or American Indian, or who are
from lower income families. And you're gonna see that reflected
in the low numbers of non white American women in math.
They're earning only five per cent of the bachelor's in math.
And so if you want an argument for maybe some
more social or environmental things that will contribute to those
(13:01):
gaps and learning, this is that because if you look
at those same ethnicities, if you go to different countries,
you can see that nature versus nurture argument being one
fully in favor of nurture. Absolutely, And one example of
this is Asian American students. It's a cultural thing. And
(13:24):
if you like, if you even think back to our
Tiger Mom episode that we did, when a culture and
or a family unit individually, UM emphasizes the importance of
education of whatever subject or education in general, you see
better performance. So, speaking of nature versus nurture, Use from
(13:44):
the University of Michigan told The New York Times that
there is good survey data showing that this disbelief and
innate ability and the conviction that math achievement can be
improved through practice is a tremendous cultural asset in Asian
society and among Asian Americans. Yeah, and he was talking
about how if you perform poorly in math, guess what,
your parents are simply going to push you to perform
(14:08):
better because they have more of a growth mindset, thinking
that that math isn't just some innate ability that you
are born with by virtue of your X or Y chromosomes,
but rather something that you can learn and adapt. UM.
In side note, Icelandic girls, we have any Icelandic listeners
girls and you on Nation are apparently math geniuses and
(14:30):
they're not entirely sure why. But when they were looking
at global math exam numbers, Icelandic girls outperforming. That is interesting.
I wonder, I wonder if that has to do with,
you know, maybe different gender roles. Yeah, because when you
move to Scandinavia, a lot of times you have places
like Norway, Iceland, Sweden that always consistently rank as being
(14:55):
the most female friendly or female friendliest. I should say
that group radically correct. Um. But in Iceland, in Japan,
all around the world, girls anxieties about being good enough
in math do hold steady from country to country. In
other words, even though Icelanded girls, for instance, are performing
(15:16):
really well, they will report higher concerns about well, maybe
they're not good enough. Yeah. Well, I mean that does
make me, speaking of self reflection through this STEM series,
that does make me think back to my math experiences.
And there was such a well, not that my family
was like you know, they were slave drivers or anything,
locking me in the basement until I did my math homework,
(15:38):
but you know, there was this push to get really
really good grades. And so I'm wondering now of having
a moment Kristen, like, I'm wondering now if you know,
maybe my grades were just in math, you know, like
I would have been a C student or something, but
I had to get that high B or that A.
Maybe I wasn't actually as bad at math, probably not,
(16:01):
probably not well. And we're going to get into that
issue of self assessment in talking about what is keeping
us from really closing up this math gender gap and
really debunking that stereotype that girls are bad at math,
that we're just naturally not as good as an at it,
that we're going to have to study above and beyond
(16:23):
in order to succeed. Right when we come back from
a quick break, so right before the break, we were
talking about confidence in math and self assessment, and we're
going to look at a few different aspects of what
keeps women and girls from progressing in their mathematical studies.
And a lot of this is coming from the Great
(16:44):
Report Why So Few Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math,
which was created for the American Association of University Women.
And so one of these cultural factors limiting girls interest
in math is that whole self assessment issue, Like I
was just talking about, you know, maybe I was a
little bit better at math than I thought I was,
(17:04):
but because I needed that a I I thought I
kind of stunk at math. And so Kimberly Showman, who's
a U. C. Davis sociologist, found that girls whose math
test scores are at the top are less likely than
boys with average or good scores to pursue science and
engineering careers. She found that women are more cautious about
(17:25):
entering those fields unless they have very high scores to
begin with. Yeah, and this is a familiar theme throughout
all of these STEM episodes, um because on top of that,
not only is there that negative self assessment going on,
but also those cultural stereotypes of where men and women belong.
We think of your prototypical mathematician, he's probably a nerdy
(17:49):
ish looking guy in a tweet jacket and big glasses,
and people are more likely to associate math and science
with men than women. And on top of that, there's
that pen alt. They often hold negative opinions of women
in these more stereotypically masculine positions. Women are judged to
be less competent than men unless they are clearly successful.
(18:13):
But if she is she's considered less likable. Oh my god,
it's a it's an incredible catch twenty two that female
mathematicians find themselves in, and that seems like an unsolvable equation.
I would like to get more math puns in this
episode if possible. I'm just warning you, um, but when
we move through the math pipeline, as Steven Cecy and
(18:38):
Wendy Williams, who are a husband wife psychological science team
in two thousand ten, wanted to look at what was
going on with the drop off, because we talked about
how we have of women earning those math related bachelors,
but then pretty large drop earning the PhDs and even
fewer than that actually pursuing math related professions. And so
(19:02):
they wanted to dig through to see what was going on,
and they said, you know, it's not necessarily sex discrimination.
It's not necessarily that women are being penalized for not
being dislikable for maybe wanting to assume these more stereotypically
masculine roles, right because I mean they even point out
that women are slightly more likely than men to be
(19:25):
interviewed for and be offered tenure track jobs in math
related fields. Instead, women are choosing not to go into
math heavy fields or dropping out once they started. And
a lot of that has to do with not only
the roles that women play in society and that they
are expected to play in the family, but also just
(19:47):
sort of the dreams and aspirations that young girls have
um about what they want to be when they grow up,
whether it's math related or not. Yeah. One example they
gave was, rather than a ton of girls saying they
wanted to grow up in a physicist, they usually say
they would want to be something like a doctor or
a veterinarian, again echoing that engineering episode where women are
(20:10):
more likely than men to select a college major or
a career field that has some social aspects, some some
altruistic impact, which being a doctor, being a veterinarian, obviously
that might make more sense than being a physicist. Not
(20:31):
to say though, once you dig into physics and all
the real world impacts, obviously there's some cool things that
are happening there. But it's just not that the education
isn't there from the get go. We are informing girls
of these choices, right and CC and Williams also point
out that there is another aspect at work here. And
that is that among men and women with comparable math skills,
(20:52):
women are more likely to have outstanding verbal ability, so
maybe more doors are open to them if they want
to pursue slightly differ sort of a tweak on a
math job. And they said that guys in math have
fewer options basically accept to stick with math. But in
the cases where women do stick with math, if we're
looking more into academia, women are more likely to drop
(21:14):
out after they start a job as a professor, often
because of the childcare issue, because the workload required to
get tenure often does not mesh very well with the
workload of caring for a child, whereas a lot of
young male professors are more likely to have a stay
at home spouse. Yeah, the study author said that this
(21:35):
at the same time that a mathematician male or female,
is trying to do all of this work to pursue tenure.
That also tends to fall within the same years where
man or woman, you're you're gonna want to start getting married,
having kids, raising those kids, and so just because of
social breakdowns and social expectations, it seems that more women
(21:57):
in this field than men are giving up math to
pursue to dedicate themselves more to the family. And this
is the same kind of off ramp and quotes that
we see in pretty much any other profession where there
does seem to come a point that for a lot
of women, you hit that crossroads of am I going
to have a family and dial back or am I
(22:19):
going to forge onward with my career. But perhaps within
STEM and specifically talking about math, it's magnified because we
are still digging ourselves out of justice historical legacy of
it being a very male dominated realm, especially when we're
talking about the old guard of STEM academia, right and
(22:43):
and you know, going back to what I said about
women possibly dropping out of math and greater numbers to
dedicate themselves more to a family or to a career
that's not as demanding. I'm not in any way, you know,
placing blame on the women themselves. You know, as Williams
points out, universities can and should do a lot more
for a woman and for those men engaged in comparably
(23:03):
intensive caretaking, they more should be done in the field itself,
at the colleges and universities themselves to make this lifestyle,
this this career choice more um welcoming. Yeah, and there's
a generational impact of attracting more female math professors because
(23:25):
those women are going to serve as those visible reminders
to younger female students taking those early math classes that hey,
she's doing this, Hey I can do that. Maybe there's
more female female mentorship that can start happening. Um. That
visibility factor that we talked about again and again comes
up with this as well, and then rooting even farther
(23:49):
back from college into elementary school. It's so imperative that
we break through that stereotype and the stereotype threat that
girls are bad at math, right, because believing in the
potential for intellectual growth improves scores and outcomes. Basically believing
(24:10):
that it is not nature that leads us to be
good or bad at one thing or another. Yeah, it's
this whole issue of the growth mindset versus a fixed mindset,
And girls who believe that intelligence can expand with experience
and learning tend to do better on math tests specifically,
and they're more likely to say they want to continue
(24:30):
to study math in the future. Right, Because, as we've
talked about in our other STEM episodes, those negative stereotypes
about girls abilities lower their test performances. So thankfully there
are prominent mentors and role models out there from the classrooms.
We've had women already writing in to us saying I
(24:50):
teach math because I want to inspire and mentor other
girls to get involved with math, which is incredible, and
you can track that all the way up to higher
prof file examples of women like Danika mckeller, who played
Winnie on The Wonder Years, who wrote a book called
Math Doesn't Suck. And even though if you're not familiar
with the book, that might sound like, oh, she just
(25:11):
wrote a book, what's the big deal? But it actually
was met with a lot of critical acclaim And I
read an excerpt from it, and she does a great
job of explaining what turned her onto math and also
how math can have a direct impact on girls day
to day lives and why in so many ways math
can make your life better. Yeah, and other podcast shout
(25:35):
out she was on an episode of The Nerdest and
she sounds so awesome and intelligent and great and is
obviously such a great role model for young women. Um.
And then there's also initiatives like the Advantage Testing Foundations
Math Prize for girls. In two thousand thirteen, for instance,
two hundred and seventy six girls competed in the fifth
(25:56):
annual competition. So they're definitely girls out there who are
interested in math joining these competitions. Yeah, and I like
that there seemed to be there seems to be this
huge push from significant organizations to encourage girls in math um.
The Institute for Advanced Study, along with Princeton, hosts an
eleven day mentoring program for undergrad, grad and post doc
(26:19):
women in mathematics, so to try to close up that
pipeline cock all those cracks in it and keep them
in there. And also, just for another example, with higher education,
m i T has its Women in Math Conference to
celebrate students, alumni, and faculty contributions to mathematics. And there
are new grants now being offered for women at the
(26:40):
earlier phases of their math careers before we're getting into
a whole tenure track issue, just starting to incentivize women
to study and stick with math. And part of me
wishes that this episode of Math could have just been
highlighting all of the lives of female mathematicians like you
feel me Aloften Hayes. The first African American woman to
(27:02):
earn a PhD in math in the United States, just
to give as many examples as possible of Hey, no,
look look at what we've done, and we can do
so much more. But we have to at some point,
somehow culturally uproot that idea that the lady brain just
didn't cut out for all those numbers and things. Yeah,
(27:26):
I yeah, don't ever read the comments on the internet
when we were doing research for this. I mean, there
were some great articles out there about some incredible women
doing incredible things in the stem fields. But judging by
the comments there, I mean, there is that huge perception
that still exists. But people talk about these perceptions of
(27:47):
women as if they are hard and true facts, like well,
I mean women's brains just aren't wired for these things, right, Well,
I feel like you have to look at it on
an individual basis. I mean, different brains are drawn to
different types of things, which is good. It's good that
we're not all mathematicians walking around, and it's good that
(28:09):
we're not all poets walking around, you know what I mean.
I think it's important to remember that Bell curve and
how we're scattered around all of its many contours both
on the more math side and more on the verbal side, right,
And so I would encourage um all of our math
(28:30):
or STEM inclined listeners to go to our Facebook page
and write your stories. We've been getting some really incredible, inspiring,
encouraging stories from from women, and I think it would
be great if you guys just continued to post them
for other women to see. Yeah, and this is something
that we would like to continue in terms of spraying
(28:51):
the word helping out in terms of the visibility because
obviously Caroline and I are not women in stead him,
but we recognize the value of getting more women and
girls engaged and also promoting the work of women who
are doing incredible things already. And so this is not
(29:12):
an initiative that we want to stop just with this podcast.
So yeah, head over to our Facebook, tweet us at
mom Stuff podcast, send us your letters mom Stuff at
Discovery dot com. We really want to hear from you
and here what's really going on outside of all these
studies and statistics we've been tossing out in the past
four episodes to really learn what it's like out there
(29:34):
for women and STEM. So with that, we are going
to take a quick break and then get back to
a couple of letters. And now how about some letters. Well,
speaking of the actors we've been receiving from STEM Women Listening,
I have a letter here from Cassidy, who wrote, thank
you for your recent podcasts on women and science. I
(29:56):
wanted to drop you a line about an encounter I
had with my advisor and grad at school. I have
a PhD in biochemistry. A group of us have traveled
to see a play about Rosalind Franklin's discovery of the
structure of DNA and Watson and Crick's involvement. After the play,
we were talking about James Watson's views on women and
minorities and science, which are not favorable, and my advisor
(30:18):
at the time made a comment stating that, well, he
may have a point. I mean, sometimes the cells are
ready at two in the morning. I just remember staring
at him in horror and saying, well, if that's the case,
then I'll be there at two in the morning. I
just thought I would share, so thanks, Cassidy, PhD in biochemistry.
I just raised the roof for you a little bit. Cassidy. Okay,
(30:40):
I have a letter here from Emily Uh. She says,
while she was listening to our stem episode, she was
knuckle deep informal in preserving tissue samples for disease and
parasite analysis by history pathology m b D. A big deal,
A good deal, alright, so Emily right. I'm a lab
(31:01):
tech at a marine research lab that focuses on shellfish.
In my lab, and in many labs I have visited,
most of the actual work is done by female students
and technicians of varying levels of education BS to pH d,
while the higher up men are stuck in their offices
writing grand proposals. However, this seems to be changing, since
two of the three recently appointed professors or women. Otherwise,
(31:23):
nearly all of my fellow lab folk are women to
male to sixteen female. The classes and tours held at
our facility are typically dominated by female students, and it
feels like the majority of students that the scientific compasses
they've been to have been female. I think that the
gender gap will continue to close as people realize the
absurdity of the idea that there are functional differences in
(31:44):
the brains of men and women as applied to stem aptitude.
And she says, thanks for spreading the word and entertaining
me while you're at it. You got it, Emily, and
thank you for writing in, and you get that Shellfish
research and thanks to everybody who's written in. Mom Stuff
at discovery dot com is where you can send your letters.
Don't forget to follow us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast,
(32:05):
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(32:29):
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Stuff Works dot com
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You from how stupp
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm
Caroline and I'm Christen, and today marks the final episode
in our fourth part STEMS series looking at women in
the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Yes, it's
(00:27):
math day here on Stuff Mom Never Told You. And
as we've been doing with the other STEM conversations, we've
been having, let's first look a little bit at history,
because for math in particular, it goes back quite a ways,
all the way to ancient Alexandria with Hypatia, who is
one of the earliest and certainly best known female mathematicians. Yeah,
(00:51):
her dad, Theon was one of the last members of
the Library of Alexandria, and she followed in his footstep
studying math and astronomy. Um. She didn't actually have a
happy ending though, Yeah, she was eventually beaten to death
with roofing tiles by an angry mob of religious zealots.
But thankfully things have improved. I mean we should say though,
(01:13):
that Hypatia was so notable for the work and the
scholarship that she was doing at the time, and I
don't think it was that she was a woman studying
math and astronomy that got her killed by an angry
religious mob, but more the fact that she was an
academic and academia was a bit at odds with obviously
(01:36):
religious zelotry. Indeed, while moving forward, we have Winnifred Edgerton Meryll.
She was the first American woman awarded a PhD in
math from Columbia University. But this was not as recent
as you might think. This was an eight Yeah, the
board of Columbia initially denied her request to pursue a
(01:56):
pH d, of course, but in her open to Wary
it was funny how math was described as a quote
unquote masculine pursuit of hers. And even though she had
to overcome that initial obstacle at Columbia, she did gain
a lot of notoriety at the time. She was very
well respected in her day, and important to our conversation
(02:18):
about women and diversity is Euphemia Lufton Haynes, who's the
first African American woman to earn a PhD in math
in ninety three from Catholic University. And by that time
many black women were earning masters in math. But if
you think about it, though, we have Meryl earning that
first PhD in eight six, and it's not until ninety
(02:38):
three that we have Haynes earning the same degree. And
that's something that will come up again where there is
that gap not just gender wise with math, but also
in terms of socio economic and ethnic backgrounds. But then
if we want to fast forward to today, just for
an example of a woman who's doing really amazing things
(02:59):
with math. One of the two thousand thirteen McArthur Fellows
is statistician Susan Murphy, and she collects and develops methodologies
to evaluate courses of treatment for people who are coping
with chronic and relapsing disorders, especially things like substance abuse
and depression. And she wanted to have an impact on
(03:22):
real life, kind of like what we were talking about
in the engineering episode. She really sees an altruistic way
to use statistics to improve people's lives. Man, I took
statistics in college my my freshman year, and that was
different from the other things that I enjoyed doing. Yeah,
I took a statistics course as well. It was the
(03:43):
one math class I was required to take in college
as a journalism major, and it was a summer statistics course,
students would show up in their swimsuits. They're basically on
a pool break to come to class, and yeah, it
was the imperative to save lives. I'll say that basic
(04:05):
statistics course wasn't there, but it was. It was still
neat to to learn those things. But what Murphy does
she calls them just in time adaptive interventions. We were
not learning that in my statistics course. But I will
say though, that what what she does is a neat
application of how math also intersects with psychiatry, mental health,
(04:26):
and also social programs. Absolutely. Also, speaking of those different
avenues for pursuing a career, let's look at some of
the fields that math majors enter. Those can include teaching,
finance and economics, or you know, like Murphy, you can
be a statistician. Yeah, there's also actuarial science, which is
analyzing statistics to calculate the probabilities of things like disability, unemployment, etcetera.
(04:51):
And there's also computer science that goes along with it,
operations research, cryptography, which is neat um budget and analysis, ease, ecology, UM.
And if you go into a math specialty, probably outside
of just basic teaching, you can earn a decent income
for sure. Yeah, the math specialists median income comes to thousand,
(05:16):
three hundred and fifty dollars. That was in with growth
expected in that sector. And so it makes me sad
that I you know, when I was in high school,
I looked my math teacher in the face and I
was like, I am never taking any more math. I
feel like throughout this entire STEM series, Caroline, you and
I both with our liberal arts background, both as journalism
(05:38):
majors in college, and I have spent some reflective times
thinking about what could have been if those scientific mathematic
seeds had maybe been planted and watered a little a
little more diligently back in the day. But um, if
we look though at the math pipeline, of all of
the letters in the M alphabet, the M is doing
(06:03):
the best. Yeah. Um, women earn of the math and
statistics bachelor's degrees, but they make up just twent of
math pH d s. So there's that pipeline theory again,
that you're losing women as they get older and go
through the educational system. Yeah, and similarly, women comprise only
twenty of the computer science and math profession workforce. So
(06:29):
kind of like with the situation for engineering, plenty of
bachelor's degrees, but then there's that major drop off once
you get into the real world. And unfortunately, in real
world terms, new census data shows that that is a
drop from a thirty four percent high in I wonder
(06:50):
what happened, mathematician people, Can you tell us Maybe we
need some actually real scientists to maybe dig through these
stats for us exactly. But if you look just at
mathematics careers, women's participation is actually up to fort from
just in nine. Yeah, so maybe the computer science gender
(07:10):
gap is pulling down that overall statistic um. But one
of the most persistent stereotypes that is talked about when
it comes to engaging girls in STEM is this idea
that girls aren't good at math. And so even though
there are a lot of women who are pursuing these degrees,
(07:33):
there is still this debate that circles back around to
this basic question of whether or not our brains are
as good with numbers compared to with words. Yeah, I mean,
that's a whole bunch of huey. Although I say that,
and then I'm going to admit that I was, I
(07:55):
have been terrible at math. My entire life. I had
tutors forever. Um I just I never it never really
clicked with me. But that's so in the same way
that you have a guy who can say the same thing,
who might be more of a word person. Thankfully, you
and I don't have to represent the entire population. But
(08:17):
when you average everything out and look at all of
girls versus all of boys, you see those generalizations, those
assumed gender differences start to disappear. And Elizabeth Spelki is
someone who we brought up in our first conversation on
Women and Science, and she is a Harvard psychologist and
(08:40):
h studies a lot about cognitive development in babies, and
she performed a meta analysis which found that babies as
young as six months performed equally well on adding and subtracting. Yes,
that's right. Infants can do their own very rudiment reforms
of addition and subtraction. And from those earliest stages, Spelkie says,
(09:03):
no difference between the male baby brain and the female
baby brain. So you know, we have these infants doing
all of that crazy infant math, which is which is
crazy time for me. I think that's interesting. That's adorable
and adorable I wonder what they're adding, like how many
milk bottles. I don't know why they have a high
pitched voice anyway, So boys and girls do perform equally
(09:26):
well in math until they start getting higher up in school,
basically around puberty time. Yeah, there are differences that emerge.
For instance, girls tend to be better at computation, whereas
boys tend to be better at problem solving. But when
researchers look at what's going on outside of school, they
(09:47):
think that perhaps these gender differences in our extracurricular activities
might simply be socializing and preparing boys better for math fields. Right.
And so boys were more likely to participate in stimulated activities,
conduct at home science experiments, and spend time on the
(10:07):
computer and own a calculator. I only recently ps got
rid of my t I don't let my parents hear
this podcast, um, whereas girls spent more time on math
homework itself. And that again, that's that pattern that we
see over and over and over again, and all of
these disciplines is girls are very diligent with their schoolwork, right,
(10:28):
they're very we're very good at making the grade, at
studying and sitting down and doing these things, whereas boys
might just be more actively engaged with it on more
of a comprehensive level. For instance, the percentage of girls
taking pre calculus slash analysis at was higher actually than
(10:49):
the percentage of high school guys at who were taking
those same classes. Right, And the same trend holds true
for the percent of girls taking algebra two, which was
seventy eight compared to guys. But an equal percentage of
males and females in high school took calculus at. Yeah.
In a side note, and I'm not entirely sure how
(11:11):
this necessarily relates directly to the gender gap, but there
was one finding that girls who take calculus are three
times more likely to study math in college. So I'm
not entirely sure, but I thought that was that was
kind of interesting. It's like an interesting predictor. But when
you look at the performance overall of boys and girls
(11:35):
on math exams, it's usually you know a bell curve
where you have the best in the brightest and then
the not so great at math on the on the
other end, and you have more boys populated on either
end of that math bell curve, So you have a
lot of guys, more guys in fact, who are really
(11:55):
really really really good at math. But you have more
guys than girls who are really really really really not
so good at math. So they're thinking that that high
end of the Bell curve, with that pocket of math
savants are skewing our perception to say that, oh, well,
guys just better than math math, whereas it's like, no, actually,
(12:15):
guys are just more spread out, they have more of
the math performance extremes. Interesting, well, I mean, speaking of gaps,
let's look at socio economics and ethnicity, which is a
factor that you mentioned earlier. Kristen Um studies have found
that white and Asian Pacific Islander students and those from
higher income families post significantly higher scores than their counterparts
(12:38):
who are black, Hispanic, or American Indian, or who are
from lower income families. And you're gonna see that reflected
in the low numbers of non white American women in math.
They're earning only five per cent of the bachelor's in math.
And so if you want an argument for maybe some
more social or environmental things that will contribute to those
(13:01):
gaps and learning, this is that because if you look
at those same ethnicities, if you go to different countries,
you can see that nature versus nurture argument being one
fully in favor of nurture. Absolutely, And one example of
this is Asian American students. It's a cultural thing. And
(13:24):
if you like, if you even think back to our
Tiger Mom episode that we did, when a culture and
or a family unit individually, UM emphasizes the importance of
education of whatever subject or education in general, you see
better performance. So, speaking of nature versus nurture, Use from
(13:44):
the University of Michigan told The New York Times that
there is good survey data showing that this disbelief and
innate ability and the conviction that math achievement can be
improved through practice is a tremendous cultural asset in Asian
society and among Asian Americans. Yeah, and he was talking
about how if you perform poorly in math, guess what,
your parents are simply going to push you to perform
(14:08):
better because they have more of a growth mindset, thinking
that that math isn't just some innate ability that you
are born with by virtue of your X or Y chromosomes,
but rather something that you can learn and adapt. UM.
In side note, Icelandic girls, we have any Icelandic listeners
girls and you on Nation are apparently math geniuses and
(14:30):
they're not entirely sure why. But when they were looking
at global math exam numbers, Icelandic girls outperforming. That is interesting.
I wonder, I wonder if that has to do with,
you know, maybe different gender roles. Yeah, because when you
move to Scandinavia, a lot of times you have places
like Norway, Iceland, Sweden that always consistently rank as being
(14:55):
the most female friendly or female friendliest. I should say
that group radically correct. Um. But in Iceland, in Japan,
all around the world, girls anxieties about being good enough
in math do hold steady from country to country. In
other words, even though Icelanded girls, for instance, are performing
(15:16):
really well, they will report higher concerns about well, maybe
they're not good enough. Yeah. Well, I mean that does
make me, speaking of self reflection through this STEM series,
that does make me think back to my math experiences.
And there was such a well, not that my family
was like you know, they were slave drivers or anything,
locking me in the basement until I did my math homework,
(15:38):
but you know, there was this push to get really
really good grades. And so I'm wondering now of having
a moment Kristen, like, I'm wondering now if you know,
maybe my grades were just in math, you know, like
I would have been a C student or something, but
I had to get that high B or that A.
Maybe I wasn't actually as bad at math, probably not,
(16:01):
probably not well. And we're going to get into that
issue of self assessment in talking about what is keeping
us from really closing up this math gender gap and
really debunking that stereotype that girls are bad at math,
that we're just naturally not as good as an at it,
that we're going to have to study above and beyond
(16:23):
in order to succeed. Right when we come back from
a quick break, so right before the break, we were
talking about confidence in math and self assessment, and we're
going to look at a few different aspects of what
keeps women and girls from progressing in their mathematical studies.
And a lot of this is coming from the Great
(16:44):
Report Why So Few Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math,
which was created for the American Association of University Women.
And so one of these cultural factors limiting girls interest
in math is that whole self assessment issue, Like I
was just talking about, you know, maybe I was a
little bit better at math than I thought I was,
(17:04):
but because I needed that a I I thought I
kind of stunk at math. And so Kimberly Showman, who's
a U. C. Davis sociologist, found that girls whose math
test scores are at the top are less likely than
boys with average or good scores to pursue science and
engineering careers. She found that women are more cautious about
(17:25):
entering those fields unless they have very high scores to
begin with. Yeah, and this is a familiar theme throughout
all of these STEM episodes, um because on top of that,
not only is there that negative self assessment going on,
but also those cultural stereotypes of where men and women belong.
We think of your prototypical mathematician, he's probably a nerdy
(17:49):
ish looking guy in a tweet jacket and big glasses,
and people are more likely to associate math and science
with men than women. And on top of that, there's
that pen alt. They often hold negative opinions of women
in these more stereotypically masculine positions. Women are judged to
be less competent than men unless they are clearly successful.
(18:13):
But if she is she's considered less likable. Oh my god,
it's a it's an incredible catch twenty two that female
mathematicians find themselves in, and that seems like an unsolvable equation.
I would like to get more math puns in this
episode if possible. I'm just warning you, um, but when
we move through the math pipeline, as Steven Cecy and
(18:38):
Wendy Williams, who are a husband wife psychological science team
in two thousand ten, wanted to look at what was
going on with the drop off, because we talked about
how we have of women earning those math related bachelors,
but then pretty large drop earning the PhDs and even
fewer than that actually pursuing math related professions. And so
(19:02):
they wanted to dig through to see what was going on,
and they said, you know, it's not necessarily sex discrimination.
It's not necessarily that women are being penalized for not
being dislikable for maybe wanting to assume these more stereotypically
masculine roles, right because I mean they even point out
that women are slightly more likely than men to be
(19:25):
interviewed for and be offered tenure track jobs in math
related fields. Instead, women are choosing not to go into
math heavy fields or dropping out once they started. And
a lot of that has to do with not only
the roles that women play in society and that they
are expected to play in the family, but also just
(19:47):
sort of the dreams and aspirations that young girls have
um about what they want to be when they grow up,
whether it's math related or not. Yeah. One example they
gave was, rather than a ton of girls saying they
wanted to grow up in a physicist, they usually say
they would want to be something like a doctor or
a veterinarian, again echoing that engineering episode where women are
(20:10):
more likely than men to select a college major or
a career field that has some social aspects, some some
altruistic impact, which being a doctor, being a veterinarian, obviously
that might make more sense than being a physicist. Not
(20:31):
to say though, once you dig into physics and all
the real world impacts, obviously there's some cool things that
are happening there. But it's just not that the education
isn't there from the get go. We are informing girls
of these choices, right and CC and Williams also point
out that there is another aspect at work here. And
that is that among men and women with comparable math skills,
(20:52):
women are more likely to have outstanding verbal ability, so
maybe more doors are open to them if they want
to pursue slightly differ sort of a tweak on a
math job. And they said that guys in math have
fewer options basically accept to stick with math. But in
the cases where women do stick with math, if we're
looking more into academia, women are more likely to drop
(21:14):
out after they start a job as a professor, often
because of the childcare issue, because the workload required to
get tenure often does not mesh very well with the
workload of caring for a child, whereas a lot of
young male professors are more likely to have a stay
at home spouse. Yeah, the study author said that this
(21:35):
at the same time that a mathematician male or female,
is trying to do all of this work to pursue tenure.
That also tends to fall within the same years where
man or woman, you're you're gonna want to start getting married,
having kids, raising those kids, and so just because of
social breakdowns and social expectations, it seems that more women
(21:57):
in this field than men are giving up math to
pursue to dedicate themselves more to the family. And this
is the same kind of off ramp and quotes that
we see in pretty much any other profession where there
does seem to come a point that for a lot
of women, you hit that crossroads of am I going
to have a family and dial back or am I
(22:19):
going to forge onward with my career. But perhaps within
STEM and specifically talking about math, it's magnified because we
are still digging ourselves out of justice historical legacy of
it being a very male dominated realm, especially when we're
talking about the old guard of STEM academia, right and
(22:43):
and you know, going back to what I said about
women possibly dropping out of math and greater numbers to
dedicate themselves more to a family or to a career
that's not as demanding. I'm not in any way, you know,
placing blame on the women themselves. You know, as Williams
points out, universities can and should do a lot more
for a woman and for those men engaged in comparably
(23:03):
intensive caretaking, they more should be done in the field itself,
at the colleges and universities themselves to make this lifestyle,
this this career choice more um welcoming. Yeah, and there's
a generational impact of attracting more female math professors because
(23:25):
those women are going to serve as those visible reminders
to younger female students taking those early math classes that hey,
she's doing this, Hey I can do that. Maybe there's
more female female mentorship that can start happening. Um. That
visibility factor that we talked about again and again comes
up with this as well, and then rooting even farther
(23:49):
back from college into elementary school. It's so imperative that
we break through that stereotype and the stereotype threat that
girls are bad at math, right, because believing in the
potential for intellectual growth improves scores and outcomes. Basically believing
(24:10):
that it is not nature that leads us to be
good or bad at one thing or another. Yeah, it's
this whole issue of the growth mindset versus a fixed mindset,
And girls who believe that intelligence can expand with experience
and learning tend to do better on math tests specifically,
and they're more likely to say they want to continue
(24:30):
to study math in the future. Right, Because, as we've
talked about in our other STEM episodes, those negative stereotypes
about girls abilities lower their test performances. So thankfully there
are prominent mentors and role models out there from the classrooms.
We've had women already writing in to us saying I
(24:50):
teach math because I want to inspire and mentor other
girls to get involved with math, which is incredible, and
you can track that all the way up to higher
prof file examples of women like Danika mckeller, who played
Winnie on The Wonder Years, who wrote a book called
Math Doesn't Suck. And even though if you're not familiar
with the book, that might sound like, oh, she just
(25:11):
wrote a book, what's the big deal? But it actually
was met with a lot of critical acclaim And I
read an excerpt from it, and she does a great
job of explaining what turned her onto math and also
how math can have a direct impact on girls day
to day lives and why in so many ways math
can make your life better. Yeah, and other podcast shout
(25:35):
out she was on an episode of The Nerdest and
she sounds so awesome and intelligent and great and is
obviously such a great role model for young women. Um.
And then there's also initiatives like the Advantage Testing Foundations
Math Prize for girls. In two thousand thirteen, for instance,
two hundred and seventy six girls competed in the fifth
(25:56):
annual competition. So they're definitely girls out there who are
interested in math joining these competitions. Yeah, and I like
that there seemed to be there seems to be this
huge push from significant organizations to encourage girls in math um.
The Institute for Advanced Study, along with Princeton, hosts an
eleven day mentoring program for undergrad, grad and post doc
(26:19):
women in mathematics, so to try to close up that
pipeline cock all those cracks in it and keep them
in there. And also, just for another example, with higher education,
m i T has its Women in Math Conference to
celebrate students, alumni, and faculty contributions to mathematics. And there
are new grants now being offered for women at the
(26:40):
earlier phases of their math careers before we're getting into
a whole tenure track issue, just starting to incentivize women
to study and stick with math. And part of me
wishes that this episode of Math could have just been
highlighting all of the lives of female mathematicians like you
feel me Aloften Hayes. The first African American woman to
(27:02):
earn a PhD in math in the United States, just
to give as many examples as possible of Hey, no,
look look at what we've done, and we can do
so much more. But we have to at some point,
somehow culturally uproot that idea that the lady brain just
didn't cut out for all those numbers and things. Yeah,
(27:26):
I yeah, don't ever read the comments on the internet
when we were doing research for this. I mean, there
were some great articles out there about some incredible women
doing incredible things in the stem fields. But judging by
the comments there, I mean, there is that huge perception
that still exists. But people talk about these perceptions of
(27:47):
women as if they are hard and true facts, like well,
I mean women's brains just aren't wired for these things, right, Well,
I feel like you have to look at it on
an individual basis. I mean, different brains are drawn to
different types of things, which is good. It's good that
we're not all mathematicians walking around, and it's good that
(28:09):
we're not all poets walking around, you know what I mean.
I think it's important to remember that Bell curve and
how we're scattered around all of its many contours both
on the more math side and more on the verbal side, right,
And so I would encourage um all of our math
(28:30):
or STEM inclined listeners to go to our Facebook page
and write your stories. We've been getting some really incredible, inspiring,
encouraging stories from from women, and I think it would
be great if you guys just continued to post them
for other women to see. Yeah, and this is something
that we would like to continue in terms of spraying
(28:51):
the word helping out in terms of the visibility because
obviously Caroline and I are not women in stead him,
but we recognize the value of getting more women and
girls engaged and also promoting the work of women who
are doing incredible things already. And so this is not
(29:12):
an initiative that we want to stop just with this podcast.
So yeah, head over to our Facebook, tweet us at
mom Stuff podcast, send us your letters mom Stuff at
Discovery dot com. We really want to hear from you
and here what's really going on outside of all these
studies and statistics we've been tossing out in the past
four episodes to really learn what it's like out there
(29:34):
for women and STEM. So with that, we are going
to take a quick break and then get back to
a couple of letters. And now how about some letters. Well,
speaking of the actors we've been receiving from STEM Women Listening,
I have a letter here from Cassidy, who wrote, thank
you for your recent podcasts on women and science. I
(29:56):
wanted to drop you a line about an encounter I
had with my advisor and grad at school. I have
a PhD in biochemistry. A group of us have traveled
to see a play about Rosalind Franklin's discovery of the
structure of DNA and Watson and Crick's involvement. After the play,
we were talking about James Watson's views on women and
minorities and science, which are not favorable, and my advisor
(30:18):
at the time made a comment stating that, well, he
may have a point. I mean, sometimes the cells are
ready at two in the morning. I just remember staring
at him in horror and saying, well, if that's the case,
then I'll be there at two in the morning. I
just thought I would share, so thanks, Cassidy, PhD in biochemistry.
I just raised the roof for you a little bit. Cassidy. Okay,
(30:40):
I have a letter here from Emily Uh. She says,
while she was listening to our stem episode, she was
knuckle deep informal in preserving tissue samples for disease and
parasite analysis by history pathology m b D. A big deal,
A good deal, alright, so Emily right. I'm a lab
(31:01):
tech at a marine research lab that focuses on shellfish.
In my lab, and in many labs I have visited,
most of the actual work is done by female students
and technicians of varying levels of education BS to pH d,
while the higher up men are stuck in their offices
writing grand proposals. However, this seems to be changing, since
two of the three recently appointed professors or women. Otherwise,
(31:23):
nearly all of my fellow lab folk are women to
male to sixteen female. The classes and tours held at
our facility are typically dominated by female students, and it
feels like the majority of students that the scientific compasses
they've been to have been female. I think that the
gender gap will continue to close as people realize the
absurdity of the idea that there are functional differences in
(31:44):
the brains of men and women as applied to stem aptitude.
And she says, thanks for spreading the word and entertaining
me while you're at it. You got it, Emily, and
thank you for writing in, and you get that Shellfish
research and thanks to everybody who's written in. Mom Stuff
at discovery dot com is where you can send your letters.
Don't forget to follow us on Twitter at mom Stuff Podcast,
(32:05):
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(32:29):
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