I have been thinking a lot about girls and math lately. My husband and I are expecting a daughter in a few weeks, and I have been reading A Field Guide to Boys and Girls by Susan Gilbert in preparation. It is very interesting – it goes through all of the stereotypes about the differences between boys and girls, talks about what has a scientific basis and what doesn’t, what society and teachers do to exacerbate the differences, and what parents can do to minimize the harmful ones. One examples of the harmful stereotypes is that boys are better than girls at math, and many girls simply decide that they are “bad at math” at an early age. This is particularly problematic, Gilbert explains, because math is a meal ticket:

High school students who aren’t well grounded in math can’t major in subjects like economics or the sciences in college… Simply put, high school students who don’t take more than the minimum requirements of math end up making less money that do students who go beyond the minimum.

As it turns out, there really isn’t any scientific background to the “boys are better at math” stereotype (with the exception of one particular type of word math problem, but there is an easy fix that involves getting girls to diagram the problem before attempting to solve it.) Rather, Gilbert believes it is a “math is hard” self-fulfilling prophecy – a reference to Mattel’s gaff in 1992 when it introduced a Teen Talk Barbie who made that proclamation. Danica McKeller, an actress/math wizard/author believes that the “math is hard” prophecy is compounded by the peer factor – being good at math is not considered cool, boys don’t like girls who are good at math – that sort of thing, and she takes on the issue in her book Math Doesn’t Suck. The Newsweek review sites examples within the book that are supposed to relate to young girls (“Say you have $50, and you want to buy a fabulous blue sundress that costs $62. Bummer! Not enough money. But wait, there’s a sale tag that says it is 1/5 off. Do you have enough money now?”)

It will be a while before our daughter has to worry about the costs of fabulous blue sundresses or boys and their perspectives on girls and math, thank goodness. But in the meantime, I plan on doing everything I can to give her a good head start and not bias her into thinking that math is going to be a difficult subject, and particularly a more difficult subject for her than the others, as Gilbert suggests parents unwittingly do with their daughters. And I will be certainly be checking to make sure she doesn't have any Barbies that tell her that, either!