Encouraging girls in maths

[LefkosiaTigers]

Where do girls get the message from that they are not supposed to be good at maths?
And importantly, how can it be countered?

My DD is 9 years old, and has recently started saying that she is useless at maths, that it's too difficult for her. Up to now, she was fine, and her teacher tells me she hasn't noticed any particular problems. I have bought some extra books, and tried to explain things to DD, and she does understand, but then she goes back to school and it all starts again.

I don't know if the universities have any suitable programmes, but I can find out. I hope it clicks for her soon, or that she snaps out of this mindset.

Role models help!

I don't know if 9 is a wee bit too young, but Hannah Fry - who is a very engaging speaker - has various fun shortish youtubes, eg at the Royal institution:

Your head teacher should know about school outreach/maths circle clubs.

Whilst you’re at it, go along to your next parent council meeting and ask about building resilience and the weight given to maths teaching, it can’t hurt.

For slightly older (but not much older) girls, get them a DVD of Hidden Figures. It's amazing.

I have been considering studying physics as a mature student so have been thinking about my childhood maths and science studies a lot recently.

I remember thinking I was bad at maths at my primary school. I got the highest sats results in my year group but still lacked confidence in my ability. I have a very clear memory of thinking the boys in my class were better at maths than the girls. Honestly I don't know where I picked this up. I didn't get this message from my parents who were both encouraging, and I knew I was better at maths than my brother. I must have absorbed it somehow. I'm not sure how that can be helped without a culture overhaul.

I went on to all-girls secondary school where maths and science were encouraged and did well in the subjects. I don't remember thinking anything about boys compared to girls then, presumably because there were no boys around to make me think about things that way. I will definitely send any dd's to an all-girls secondary school based on this.

I then went to a mixed sex college and the head discouraged me from studying a level physics saying the maths would be too advanced. This was despite me achieving high A grades in GCSE maths and physics. I followed his advice at the time and picked a different subject. One I didn't enjoy and ended up dropping out of. It was only years later that I began to question this.

There's a ton of women in science short videos here, too - the maths ones are possibly for older girls but there's some good stuff there, women talking about their own work and explaining what they do:

Was just going to suggest Hidden Figures as well!

Lots of good advice here. We are always telling DD2 (who is good at maths) that if the sums are hard that's good because her teacher wants to stretch her, if they are easy then she won't learn anything.

More votes for maths games: lego, minecraft, sudoku, puzzle books, jigsaws, models, Rubik's cube etc etc. Much better than books of sums.

Female role models are excellent, our girls know all about Mary Somerville, Ada Lovelace, Margaret Hamilton, Hedy Lamarr, etc etc. There are lots of books of women scientists aimed at kids now.

It's such an amazing film.

(The more girls see that women have been amazing mathematicians for forever, then the more they won't see it as something Girls Aren't Good At.)

Hidden Figures is brilliant.

There's loads of good books come out recently.
A Galaxy of Her Own (I love this because it starts with Emelie du Chatelet - fantastic mathematician, translator and commentator on Newton.)
Women in Science

To add to Count's list, as well as du Chatelet, it's worth looking up Maryam Mirzakhani and Emmy Noether. Oh, and Chien-Shiung Wu, who measured the helicity of the neutrino and confirmed Yang and Lee's theory (they got the Nobel prize, she didn't - how much of that is down to her being a woman, and how much down to the Nobel committee tending to favour theoreticians over experimentalists...) Rosalind Franklin, Dorothy Hodgkin also worth a look for their work in crystallography (Hodgkin did get the Nobel prize).

Another thing that could be happening is that when women feel unconfident/unable they say, "I'm no good at that" whereas men say, "I don't like that - it's not for me." Thus lots of boys rejecting reading or regarding reading as an unimportant/inferior activity but lots of girls sub-consciously elevating maths to the status of something "very important and difficult."

I was terrible at sums at school. I have a particular form of dyslexia which makes arithmetic really hard. Being told I was no good was great for me, in a way though, because it made me want to show them. If arithmetic is hard then maths is agony of course.

I then taught maths occasionally - not to children. People loved my approach because whenever they said how they were stuck I could respond from the point-of-view of having been there - I had literally done every wrong thing.

I would play at maths with friends' children and apply the same techniques. Could always get them to do stuff well above where they were conventionally rated. Parents were weird though. When I got their child to difficult solve problems the parents were negative. I could see that parents had an expectation for their child, based on their experience of them, and then accidentally reflected that back on the child.

I think we judge how good children are by how easy it is to teach them - not how well they can actually perform once taught.

So my advice, for what little it is worth, is;

1. When trying to understand something their weakness will not be what yours once was. Chances are that the essential step they find hard is something you found easy when you were that age and vice versa. You have to ignore your own prejudice.

1. Try and get into their head regards what doesn't click. No matter how stupid or simple the issue seems, if it is blocking them then you need to find the magic connection that gets them over the problem - their magic connection. Identify where they are stuck and think round that issue trying lots of different ways of approaching it.

1. Just keep going. When it takes a long time for them to learn X then as much as that time is to do with them it will reflect on you. You now have to teach them Y and as you do more and more then you will get better at teaching as they get better at maths.

1. Relate it to the real world, that is important, but don't patronise, this is equally vital. One example for me was logarithms. My maths teachers enjoyed them as an abstract challenge. Few people enjoy things in that way - and more men than women I observe. So what got the teachers into maths made them bad teachers. When I started working and realised that hearing is logarithmic, as is vision, I finally engaged and mastered log functions. I use them regularly now to solve all kinds of problems.

I hope that helps.

DD is a bit of a maths wiz. At 12 she has surpassed any help I can give her and says she likes maths because "there is a right answer and a wrong answer, no waffle and writing of paragraphs to prove a point" (she really doesn't like English!)

In her last two termly tests she has come top of her class and the stick she got from 2 boys who always used to be top is unreal. So much so that at parents eve I had to ask the teacher to have a word. To give him his due he was horrified and said he "wouldn't stand that in his classroom" but that he agrees it seems to be embedded in kids that boys are better at maths. He told DD that she was "here to prove that wrong"

Some of it I think is confidence, and some the age old "men dismissing women" - at a primary maths competition with 3 boys and DD on the team DD hardly got a word in - even as far as the boys shouting wrong answers over her right ones. I was furious but sadly she wouldn't stick up for herself (and I have to say the boys parents didn't seem to care either, couple of embarrassed shrugs but nothing concrete). DD doesn't put herself forward for anything like this any more because of it, which saddens me but I understand why.

OP, like a PP I was top of my co-Ed year at Maths but it never occurred to me that I was naturally good at it or that it was something I should do. It’s bizarre in the extreme but some attitudes I remember encountering from both parents and teachers were probably responsible:

• the idea that boys are more logical.
• that girls do well until puberty then boys take over. (I always thought this was why I found calculus hard )

-the lack of famous women scientists, the only one I knew of, Marie Curie, died of cancer.

Add to that the geeky stereotypes that abound of the Sheldons and Leonards and other “adorkable” Male characters whose aptitude at STEM seem to go hand in hand with so-perceived “male” characteristics of social ineptitude and it’s not really surprising that many girls get the message that Maths is for boys. Even the conscious effort to counter it reinforces the stereotype in a way.

If you can afford it I’d go to the Maths dept of the local uni and find a female maths student who can teach and encourage your daughter. I have a wonderful student teacher for my son who struggles in Maths but who, incidentally, never thinks it’s because he’s a boy.

Good luck and what a marvellous Mum you are for striving to encourage your daughter in this way

I attended a seminar for parents as part of a Girls in STEM event. A number of organisations (not Uk), presented on their observational studies and talked about the subject. Key observations:

Classroom attitudes: It's accepted that girls struggle with Maths and are told it's ok, they are doing fine, they will get there at their own pace whereas when boys struggle with reading resources are mobilised to support them. Recently, DD entered a Maths competition, no one put her under any pressure (me included) and she did well, some of the boys put themselves under pressure and did a lot of practice outside of school and did really well... DD was disappointed that she didn't practice more, I felt guilty for not pushing her a bit more... I discussed the observation with DD's teacher and she did say that there may well be some unconscious behaviours involved and that perhaps there was a way to address this.

Classroom Roles: Girls are frequently put on tables with weaker students to help them, on the guise that it strengthens their own understanding. They respond well to this responsibility and adopt a compliant caring approach. As a result they are not on the table who are pushing the boundaries, expanding their knowledge, being innovative and are not the ones who are working out how to blow up the lab.

Testing and exams: discussed the possibility that the testing and exam process disadvantaged girls and was more suited to boys.

Follow the money: A university professor discussed the numbers of people working at various levels and that higher level positions continue to occupied by men and papers authored by men but those departments with more women are more successful in terms of research. One university professor also said that there were 19th C female scientists and mathematicians but they have been largely written out of history.

The event was depressing really but inspiring for the girls who met hundreds of awesome female scientists and mathematicians.

PS. They also cited a study about attitudes in primary school, at the age of 5, girls believe they are good at maths, by the age of 7, they have lost this despite their relative ability having not changed at all. It is cultural, unconscious but pervasive.

Stereotype threat - girls end up believing they're bad at maths because they get loads of messages that they're not as good at maths, even if those messages are based on rubbish.

I think not knowing our history is important, too. People think IT was all Turing and Gates and Jobs, but it was also Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper and Hedy Lamarr and the ENIAC women and many others. We wouldn't have an IT industry without all the women who were there first. All the first coders were women. The first compilers were written by women, the first sorting algorithm... (Bit of a pet subject of mine, is this.) And there were mathematicians like Emmy Noether and others.

I think the best thing to do is just use maths all the time, without pointing out it's maths. Pretty much any situation can use basic arithmetic. I guess it depends what works for her, if Kumon or similar does it, then great.

Maybe she's just... bad at maths? I've never had the girls are bad at maths thing.

Darkstuff and Coriander are right, but I think there is a generalised anti-intellectual attitude against hard sciences, not just against maths. How many times do you hear “I’ve never used algebra/physics/chemistry in my life since leaving school” ?

There does seem to be a point in around Year 4/Year 5 when many girls lose confidence in maths. Partly I think because when they say they find it difficult, their Mums sometimes soothe them saying 'it's ok, I'm bad at maths too' and also I think because in my experience boys tend more to be competitive (tend, not iron clad are). Maths ability at that age is often measured in how quickly they race through their questions. The boys compete with each other and boom, think they are the best.

It's not always the case of course, dd was competitive with another girl in her class. However that girl was faster than dd with her timestables. dd believed for a time that meant she wasn't very good. It took a lot of reinforcement that tables were a memory test and not maths. It was only when problems went beyond that, could dd shake her disbelief of herself. She turned out to be an excellent mathematician, but I do wonder what might. have happened if she had had different parenting and had given up, labelling herself as rubbish.

I'm competent at maths, at school I was extremely competitive with everything apart from sport, but my confidence was dented in my first year of high school with a girls can't do maths teacher. I was fortunate that in the next year I had a teacher who encouraged me.

Agree with EBearhug about the invisibility of female role models in maths

As well as youtube stuff, there's some really good initiatives which promote women role models, and show maths - and other STEM subjects - as a subject that girls do. Eg:

Stemettes - lots of online and social media stuff, plus free events, schools visits, etc.

Ada Lovelace Day - a day of activities all over the world about women in STEM every October, plus all sorts of stuff throughout the year, and free schools resources on the website. Plus youtube channel.

Code first: girls - a tech thing rather than a pure maths thing, but a really good start.

When I was at (mixed) school, it was always girls who were top of the class for maths (and science). It wasn't a perfect school, but I never heard a teacher say anything that might have discouraged girls.
I did hear lots of girls saying they were no good at maths though. Perhaps it's a peer pressure thing?
There were certainly plenty of girls and boys who seemed to wear being rubbish at school as a badge of honour, and would ridicule people who worked hard as swots.

Maybe she's just... bad at maths? I've never had the girls are bad at maths thing.

Unfortunately I’ve had it loads. And so must have many girls else there would be a much higher uptake of Maths at A level and beyond.

Confidence, confidence, confidence. It's a huge issue with girls in maths. Read this thread for an example: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/secondary/3153109-Should-I-ask-if-DD-can-be-moved-down-a-set

The research shows that girls underestimate their own abilities in relation to their peers. Girls socialised to perfectionism also struggle when maths is difficult and so they don't get it right first time, or don't know how to do a question straight away. I've seen so many girls rip a page out of their book because it has something wrong on it, or have a blank page after 15 minutes because they were too scared to write anything in case it wasn't the right thing (giving them a whiteboard can help here as mistakes are easily erased and forgotten).
They need to get the message that if it were easy all the time, the teacher wouldn't be teaching them properly, and that getting stuff wrong and trying new approaches is part of maths. I make a point of showing where I took a wrong route or made a mistake in my working out in preparation for a lesson.

Boys in the classroom can also be an issue as they tend to be louder and more confident regardless of ability giving the impression to girls that they might not be as good as them.

Just seen this on the BBC Radio 4 site - less than 3 minutes long, and really good:

Eugenia Cheng