When one sees a baby human, one’s response is typically along the line of “Aw, what a cute, precious baby! What’s the name?”
Insert societally-defined boy’s name here.
“Wow, he sure is handsome!”
Insert societally-defined girl’s name here.
“My goodness, she sure is beautiful!”
How quickly our perceptions change.
Let’s face it, as Dr. Elizabeth S. Spelke and Dr. Ariel D. Grace suggest in their article “Sex, Math, and Science,” we’re basically all screwed once that figurative, or sadly literal blue or pink fleece hat is placed snuggly atop our bare baby heads. Those blue hats must protect all the spatial abilites, mathematical talents, and inclinations of going into STEM that are stored soundly in baby boy’s brain all throughout his tenure with the Physics department. Whereas, the pink hats should warm up all the potential people-skills and emotional connectivity baby girl has doddling around in her head as she works twice as hard to trying to get a professor of Physics job.
Spelke and Grace addresses this issue of gender difference and gender bias, which may be conscious or unconscious, by juggling three different topics: cognition, discrimination, and motivation. Through their research, males’ and females’ appear to have the same cognitive abilities, including object perception, and numerical and spatial reasoning. Math aptitude tests, according to Spelke and Grace are skewed and “underpredict women’s success at mathematics” (61). However, what if these tests overpredict men’s success at mathematics? In a study conducted by Shane W. Bench and Heather C. Lench of Washington State University’s and Texas A&M University’s departments of Psychology, in which men and women took a math exam and then estimated the quality of their performance, in both of the two trials that were conducted, men were more likely to overestimate the quality of their performance than women. Now, we must ask ourselves: Why?
Society. Society is almost always to blame! As outlined in Jeffrey Nevid’s Psychology: Concepts and Applications:
“Our culture appears to train women to perform a simple deduction based on a faulty premise that math is ‘masculine.’
Math = Male
Me = Female
Therefore, Math ≠ Me”
Math is just another thing society tells women they cannot do, along with football, burping, wrestling, slouching, the list goes on (speaking from experience). On the flip side, males are being told the exact same thing. Men are supposed to be good with numbers and building things. If a five year old male toddler builds a “house” out of cardboard bricks, he gets told he’s going to be an engineer! If I build a replica of the Great Wall of China out of the same blocks, I get told I’m “creative.” (True story! Of course, at the time, I had no idea what an “engine ear” was, but I do now, and I’m mad.)
Overall, our society depends so heavily upon tests; the meaning of life is no longer 42, but 2400. Tests prompt competition. That being said, I propose that, on a social level as women are gradually being urged into STEM fields, men feel their abilities are being challenged. The way it has been for so long is that STEM fields were so undeniably male-dominated. Perhaps, this new wave of “low-key,” microagressive discrimination is actually brought on by fear of emasculation.
References
Bench, Shane W., and Heather C. Lench. “Gender Gaps in Overestimation of Math Performance.” SpringerLink. Springer International Pusblishing, June 2015. Web. 11 Sept. 2015.
Ceci, Stephen J., and Wendy M. Williams, eds. Why Aren’t There More Women In Science. 1st ed.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2007. Print.
Nevid, Jeffrey S. “Gender and Sexuality” Psychology: Concepts and Applications. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. 417. Web.