Busting the myth of the math gender gap

1. xx<xy? - Busting the myth of
the math gender gap
Deep-rooted cultural biases rather than biology to blame for the
under-representation of women in STEM fields, say experts
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2. Contd…
`Math class is tough“ were the infamous first words of Mattel's talking Bar
bie doll in 1992, which caused a furore in the US. Now, ICICI Bank chief
Chanda Kochhar has unwittingly echoed that view, suggesting that business
schools have fewer women because the entrance test tilts towards
quantitative skills.The real reason there are fewer women cracking it, though,
is that engineering students have an edge in the Common Aptitude Test
design, “and there's a massive gender gap in engineering,“ says Kavita Singh,
who teaches at the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi.
This view is echoed by Rajan Saxena, vice-chancellor of NMIMS University,
who says that the CAT format says nothing about women's quantitative
competence, and in fact, “most of the students in our merit list are girls“.
“There is no evidence at all to say girls are bad with numbers. The number of
women in banking, including Chanda Kochhar herself, proves otherwise“,
says S Ravikumar, professor of organizational behaviour at IIM Bangalore.
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3. Contd…
And yet, the perception that women prefer words to numbers is borne out across careers
in not just finance but also science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). They
do seem to cluster in traditionally “feminine“ disciplines like languages and arts, health and
welfare, education, and so on. But is this because of differences in innate ability, as former
Harvard University president Lawrence Summers controversially suggested, or with
socialization and patterns of discrimination? “The idea that women are not maths friendly
is a self-perpetuating myth,“ says mathematician Sujatha Ramdorai, who teaches at the
University of British Columbia. The reason they drop out of quant-focused careers are
obviously not academic, she says. At the schoolleaving level, girls outperform boys in
maths and science. And yet, large numbers of them choose not to specialize in these fields
even though “quant“ jobs pay more.
“The number of female students writing the Joint Entrance Examination itself is much
lower than that of male students,“ says Prof S Sundar, department of Mathematics at IIT
Madras, who also oversees the JEE admissions. Out of the 1.24 lakh students who
registered for this year's JEE, only 22,355 were female. Of the nearly 10,000 seats available
across the 18 IITs in the country, only 900 were filled by women. So what gives?
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4. STEM THE ROT
Girls are gently discouraged from science and math, in school and outside.
Educators have studied the gendered words we use to describe subjects.
Science is thought to be about “concepts“ and “understanding“ and marked
out as male turf, while girls are often told they are good at things that
involve “mugging up“ or rote memorisation.
“Expectations from girls are not high,“ says education expert Anita Rampal.
“If you don't challenge a kid enough, she skids on the margins“. The other
problem is the subliminal messages that the media and wider culture beam
into girls, says Ramdorai. “Having role models in STEM is so important, and I
don't think the effects can be measured. For instance, how many of us know
that Albert Einstein was able to complete his work because of the insights of
fellow scientist Emmy Noether?“
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5. MARRIAGE ABOVE MATHS
But unlike the West, psychological barriers are not centrally responsible for
the maths gender gap in India, found social anthropologist Carol
Mukhopadhyay. Here, family roles and expectations play the overwhelming
role in education decisions. In her survey in 2004, there was no consensus
that girls are wired to be worse at maths. The factors deterring them are
families that don't care enough about their career attainments, and
questions of financial investment, marriageability and social safety on
faraway campuses.
Even the women who choose quantitative careers find that their institutions
make no effort to enable them. While families are seen as a woman's duty,
there is no flexible work option, or even daycare, Ramdorai points out. “Only
the presence of more women in policymaking and funding agencies can
make a difference,“ she says.
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6. SOUTH STATS
All this defeatist talk about women's aptitude for quantitative work is
belied by the facts. For one, the gender gap is actively declining. A
research paper on “Gender, Subject and Higher Education“ in India by
Meenakshi Gautam of Jawaharlal Nehru University found that the
proportion of women studying science was 43.85% in 20112012 as
compared to only 7.1% in 19501951. The facts that teaching practices
have been found to change the chances of women choosing maths,
and that this gap is not consistent across social groups (the southern
states have far more women in STEM than the north) -proves that
there's nothing inevitable about this. We should be counting the ways
we can fix it.
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