Math Is Hard, Let's Go Shopping!

[sisabet]

I've got another meeting to run to in a minute, but this one involves Pizza! so they have my full and utter cooperation.

Also, I might be a little bit in love with them. They are feeding me pizza!

::is easy::


All last night, in between waiting for the pending botulism attack that never came, I thought about vids and vidding and being a vid viewer and this morning while I was laying in the tub, I was composing a very long and detailed LJ post about this and all morning at work I have been adding to it, hoping to get a moment to just sit back and type it out.

And then I checked the New York Times headlines and forgot all about it.

http://nytimes.com/2005/02/18/education/18harvard.html (free registration required)

So apparently the President of Harvard University is something of a... well I believe the technical term is "A Dick" but since I am a woman I am intrinsically wired to not really care about technical things.

But - to be fair - he does say several times in the released comments (about the shortage of women in science and engineering fields) that he would love to be proven wrong. I am no fan of censoring ideas... but see, while he states that these are just ideas -- he also discounts that socialization has very much to do with any of this at all.

(I also love how he manages to imply that catholics aren't really wired to be investment bankers and jewish people just don't farm).

And while he says that these ideas are just that - ideas - and hey, I agree we need to ask questions and search for answers -- my big problem is that he appears to not only be voicing an intrinsic female disinterest (we just don't have the ability) in science as a potential reason there is a shortage of qualified women in the field, not solely as an idea - but as a belief that he will hold until it is proven otherwise.

And I think I can safely say that he Just Does Not Get It. He discounts socialization without ever understanding exactly how pervasive it can really be. It isn't even like this is something we have overcome and this current generation of adolescent girls have a wide-open choice to enter into any field that they find interesting - no, we have made GREAT progress in recognizing the many and insidious ways we as a society steer girls actively away from being interested in Math and Science, but hell - we still have a lot to do.

It was less than 15 years ago that Mattel released a talking Barbie doll that actually said the subject line of this post. The doll was pulled and the saying has now entered our collective unconsciousness, but the fact remains that a MAJOR TOY PRODUCER let this product go all the way through to customer and no one stopped and said "Hmmm... this is kinda ridiculous and demeaning." And if you don't think Mattel had a major impact on a lot of the American Female Collective Experience - well, maybe you had a different collective experience than I did. It happens. (and I am not saying we all played with Barbie dolls. I am saying that we were encouraged to play with Barbie dolls and a lot of us did as we were encouraged. I myself had a very strong and active Barbie addiction from 1979 up and until I finally went cold turkey in 1987. It was rough. Even now I sometimes see money in units of $10 with each unit being represented in my head by 1 Barbie Doll. An Example: "Oh, I just got $100 bonus! Wow, that is like ten barbies!")

My point is that this is not something we are going to overcome in a generation or two. We just identified it as actually being real and valid when I was a child. I don't expect to see real and permanent progress in fighting this until... well I probably will be dead. This doesn't mean that we shouldn't work really hard at recognizing and eradicating this mindset and supporting our young women absolutely. This just means there is a ton of work and time keeps marching in one direction. I think - see I was never really good with that kinda stuff.

::goes shopping::

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

So apparently the President of Harvard University is something of a... well I believe the technical term is "A Dick" but since I am a woman I am intrinsically wired to not really care about technical things.

Okay, this is my favorite response to the article so far.

[mpoetess.livejournal.com]

Even now I sometimes see money in units of $10 with each unit being represented in my head by 1 Barbie Doll. An Example: "Oh, I just got $100 bonus! Wow, that is like ten barbies!")

GET OUT OF MY HEAD.

[movies-michelle.livejournal.com]

You know, I work at a university, in the college of engineering, in a department run by a woman (and the outgoing dean of the college is a woman), and I deal with quite a lot of women who are currently in the program. Are they outnumbered by men in the program? Yes, but I don't think overwhelmingly. While we have more male graduate students than females, we have more female undergrad students in the program than males. Also, we have a pretty even split when it comes to PhD candidates. So...yeah.

I think he brings up a couple of points that do need to be discussed more. However, as you point out, he also seems to be something of a dick. And, yes, as you and the physics professor quoted at the end of the article both say, he's not taking into account the social pressures placed on women. Are married women with children less inclined to work 80-hour-days than men? Yes, but that's because society tells women they are bitches if they do not sacrifice career goals to take care of their children, and tells men they're pussies if they decide to be the one to sacrifice career goals to spend more time with their kids. I think both genders get trapped by that.

Personally, I am actually really good at math and sciences. I've always gotten really good grades in all of it. But I am also bored to tears by it all. *shrug*

--Signed a white, female, Catholic, who never really thought about being an investment banker, farmer, NBA player, or engineer

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

Oh - I wanted to be an engineer and then I found out that they didn't actually get to drive the trains.

[movies-michelle.livejournal.com]

Same here. My dad is an engineer and I remember thinking when I was little how cool that was. And I knew he liked trains, so it made sense that he would work with trains for work, right? Very disillusioning when I found out what he really did. Le sigh.

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

Yes - engineers should have much cooler jobs just based on the title alone.

[fyrdrakken]

A week or so back, I linked to an editorial in response on just how pervasive the social pressure is.

And, yeah. Sooner or later I'm going to get around to doing a lengthy rant on how feminism trapped American women by denigrating homemaking and childrearing (making it so men don't want to be seen dealing with either and so women feel shamed to claim either is important) and forcing women to attempt to prove their worth by male standards out in the career world (because homemakers are lazy or ambitionless) yet pressuring them into marrying and having children (because women who don't do so are just sublimating their drives into their careers and/or are selfish and/or are unnatural/unfeminine/unable to attract a decent man). So women who aren't working two fulltime jobs bringing home a paycheck and raising a family are made to feel they're slacking off or missing out somehow rather than that they're too sane to burn themselves out like that, and women who are stuck with both roles can't devote themselves completely to either and are penalized in the working world for being female, not for being stuck in a bad system. (And I need to do the full rant so that I can just stick it in my memories and link to it when necessary, rather than going off on mini-rants in others' LJs whenever a related topic seems to arise.)

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

Sooner or later I'm going to get around to doing a lengthy rant on how feminism trapped American women by denigrating homemaking and childrearing (making it so men don't want to be seen dealing with either and so women feel shamed to claim either is important

See - I don't think feminism is the where we need to look to pinpoint the denigration of homemaking and childrearing. That was going on loooong before feminism became an active movement.

I think it is important to stress that taking care of children is NOT "woman's work" - that it is "human's work" but again - I don't think feminism is to blame for the absolute cultural contempt in this country for *anything* perceived as being feminine.

Being a Girl= bad or an insult. Being a Boy = good for all concerned. So girls can now play with trucks and race cars and wear blue (and yay! this is wonderful and I *wish* it had been around more when I was a kid cause I loved my brother's racing cars) but let a little boy want a Barbie Doll or like the color pink...and all hell breaks loose.

The quickest way for a female to be overlooked or not taken seriously is to wear a lot of pink. Ask Lana Lang about that.

I don't think feminism created ANY of these attitudes, it just makes it all more apparent that they exist.

[fyrdrakken]

See, the rant I want to write is about how feminism's mistake was in allowing the terms of the debate to be defined as, "Women are as good as men -- because we can do anything men can do," and wound up trapped in trying to do everything men do and everything men do, rather than in attacking the proposition that "feminine = useless." Feminists haven't been trying to do the latter very much at all, just the former -- and that's why "girly" remains an insult and even women sometimes feel vaguely shamed at doing or caring about feminine things.

[fyrdrakken]

Should have been "everything men do and everything women do" above, BTW.

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

Well I do think that I can do anything a man can do. Well - urinating while standing is rather difficult...

But yeah - I think there is merit in both positions, cause I'd make a shitty as hell homemaker.

[fyrdrakken]

See, I can't stand cooking or cleaning and have never been a fan of small children so I always figured that if I was going to have kids it would be great to have a husband who was willing and able to be the one to chase around after them. Except for the whole breastfeeding thing and me figuring that I could stand to stay at home with the baby at least a little bit (keeps the kid healthier and helps me burn off those pregnancy calories, right?) -- and another grudge I have with the setup in this country came when I learned that the 12 weeks mandatory unpaid maternity leave we were only given by the grace of Clinton really sucks compared to the full year unpaid offered in Australia or the six months paid (and optional six months unpaid extension) in the UK. One of my coworkers came back from her maternity leave last month -- my office cleverly convinces a lot of the female employees to voluntarily exchange 12 weeks unpaid for 8 weeks paid leave, which basically gave her barely enough time to recover from her C-section.

But, yeah. A former coworker explained to me that he worked nights because he and his wife had moved to Dallas from Oklahoma and all their family was back there and they didn't know anyone here they'd trust to babysit so they deliberately worked different shifts so there'd be someone at home with their daughter at all times. And only got to see much of each other on the weekends. I was damned lucky that Mom's parents A) lived close by and B) retired while I was in kindergarten or first grade, thereby buying me summers and afternoons at their place rather than at a daycare. (Until age almost-seven I was deemed old enough to be a latchkey kid -- though my younger sister remained in daycare.)

[barkley.livejournal.com]

And it's still trickling down in infant/toddler clothes. I didn't notice when I just had a neice, but when I went to pick out clothes for my nephew, his were cute train conductor things or stuff that said, "pilot, engineer, conductor" and hers just said, "cutie patootie" and "princess."

[katie-m.livejournal.com]

Surely you don't mean to imply that could have some impact on society, do you?

[nerdanel.livejournal.com]

But of course! We women aren't actually supposed to have CAREERS or AMBITIONS. After all, even if we go to Harvard, we are less "intrinsically capable" then our male fellow students, and as such should aspire to the kept-woman "princess" title. *rolls eyes*

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

God, your icon is so apt right now.

[annakovsky.livejournal.com]

Sigh. That's my president. The whole place has been freaking out about it for the last month, though, so at least he finally released the text. Even if he is an ass.

[nerdanel.livejournal.com]

That makes two of us. I was excited to read in the Times yesterday that it looks like the faculty board/body/council/whatever (sorry, I'm in the law school and know nothing about FAS whatsoever) is going to give him a vote of no confidence. I love the LS dean (Elena Kagan), but have been less than impressed with the others who are responsible for governing this place.

Although, I'm now a law student, I earned my way into this place by graduating at the very top of my undergraduate class with a B.S. in chemistry, and as such, I was outraged to read of the comments in question. My "intrinsic aptitude" certainly was no less than any of my male classmates, all but one of whom graduated with lower GPAs than mine. I do not believe that my school should have to suffer the indignity of having him as a leader, and I hope to read of his receiving a vote of no confidence shortly. He has done little to merit anyone's confidence IMO.

[kadymae.livejournal.com]

Okay, first off, I will say that right now, I am writing this while sick at work (nausea + headache) so bear that in mind if my reasoning seems a bit unclear.

I'm going to take a teensy bit of devil's advocate stance. Male and Female brains are different. It's quantifiable. And, while the difference between the male & female scores on standardized tests when it comes to verbal versus spatial skills may have something to do with socialization, I really do think that evolution played a huge role in that and the differences all tie back to the quantifyable differences in the brains.

That said, I know of very few other women who grasped geometry (the only math I ever found "easy") as naturally as I did, and I know no other woman in my social circle with the same intrinsic sense of direction, distance, and landmarks. I'm often asked how do I know where north is? How did I know how to get from point A to B? How did I know how far it was and how long it would take? Where did I learn to tell these things? I don't know. I've always just known them. I'm not shitting you when I say that if you came up to me right now and asked which direction Mecca was, I would not have to think about it to point you the right way.

When I took those batteries of standardized tests in High School, I was the only woman clustered in with the top scoring men when it comes to shapes and spatial orientations. I accept the fact that I am an anomaly in terms of this skill.

However, we live in a world that in many ways does NOT resemble that which gave rise to the differences in our brains. It is no longer essential to the survival of the species that the men range far afield to hunt while the women stay closer to the camp and talk to each other a lot while they forage and rear the children.

At this stage of the game, I say it is vital for the further evolution of the species that both sexes be equally encouraged to explore every opportunity open to them.

---

Incidentally, I had two technically trained parents (RN w/OB-GYN specialty) and Electrical Engineer who always encouraged me in math and science. Other than geometry I've never found math in the least interesting, but I subscribe to Discover Magazine because I find a lot of the sciences very fascinating.

What I'm getting at, is, while I chose a career that takes advantage of my verbal/communication aptitude, I was encouraged as a little girl to discover what my real skills and interests were.

---

Oooh, and finally, we're good friends with a hispanic family. Two of the daughters in the family have a real aptitude for math, and in fact one of them wants to change her major to mathematics.

Her parents, bless them, have not placed any undue pressure on either daughter to pursue a "real" career, other than the frank question of "well, what do you do with a BS in Math?"

Ralph and I keep reminding both of them that in many cases the job you end up doing isn't often directly related to what you majored in, but often uses the skills you learned.

Hopefully we can get both of them to understand that a math major/minor is a GREAT idea if Math is what they love. Minor/Major in something practical (like accounting, finance, or MIS if you think you have to).

[sisabet.livejournal.com]

I have absolutely no spatial skills at all - I think this is more related to the fact that my eyesight is really terrible than anything else. I loved Biology and Physics in school, did not enjoy geometry and respected Calculus, but never really wanted to get all that serious with it. Alegebra and I were hot and heavy at first and then that passion waned as I learned there was more involved than just quadratic equations.

I also had parents (well, mom) that pushed the hard sciences. When I say pushed - I mean, if you were not premed - then why the hell are you in college? pushed. And I didn't really get that (mom's a teacher, dad's a farmer) but it did work. Dawn's a doctor and David (before he died) was premed with incredible grades and I *tried* to be a Biology major, I did. I tried twice.

And I wasn't cut out for it at all - it was not where my intrinsic strengths lie. But I don't think that has any more to do with my sex than the fact that I really like comic books or dogs. I just am this person.

I do think there are basic differences to how our minds are wired (male v female) and I am fascinated by the study of this -- but I think when the President of Harvard starts using this as a basis that must be disproven for why women are not comprising 50% of the field - we have a problem.

That and he really is just a dick - ya know?

[witling.livejournal.com]

Dude, I hear you. I saw a version of his comments posted on a list a few weeks ago (this isn't the first version that's aired), and passed it on to my friend, who's a (female) science librarian. At our university, there's the usual chronic gender imbalance in the hard sciences and in math. It's a Thing. The few female faculty around here are seriously pissed about his comments. I have no idea how the men are reacting. Probably by not caring or noticing very much, because they're busy thinking about math/computer science, and this isn't their issue. Which is, yes, exactly why we're in this position to begin with. Women have to spend time thinking about this and struggling with it and trying to show that it's not just their own deficiencies causing the imbalance in the first place, while men (generally speaking) are all..."Whuh? Sorry, I was just calculating Pi to the seventy-third decimal..."

In conclusion, shut up, Mr. Harvard President. You're making your side look worse.