I love weekends, but not because I get to hangout out later or sleep longer in the mornings because there is none of that when you have young children. I love weekends because we can cheat on bedtime a little and do more of the stuff that gets cut short with dinner prep, homework, and general school night madness. Last night as Pea and I snuggled up in bed listening to a Geronimo Stilton audiobook and doing some kiddie coding I got sad for just a second.
Now I know that it makes no sense to get sad in this perfect moment, but let me explain. Pea is six and right now she loves math and thinks that computers and video games are the coolest things on the planet. Rather than aspiring to be a cheerleader, model, or some such madness that is pushed upon young girls by society, she says she wants to be the next “Dr. B.” she wants to teach people how to make video games and there’s no doubt in my mind that she can do it. So here is where the sadness comes in. Recently, as researchers and educators have started to try to figure out why there are so few women in the STEM disciplines they have found that while girls generally out score boys in math and science until the 5th grade after that something changes. If 66% of 4th grade girls self report that they like science, doesn’t it seem odd that only 18% of girls actually pursue STEM majors like engineering in college. And it’s not the intellect of girls or boys, but rather the ways that they are treated by teachers and parents and how that treatment causes them to think about their own aptitude. One study suggests that since girls see their intelligence as a fixed thing while boys see theirs as something that they have to work at, so as things get more difficult girls are more likely to just give up when something does not come easily to them and boys are more likely to work at it.
But I have another theory floating around in my head. While I have yet to see a study that points directly to teacher demographics as a possible contributing factor, I wonder how much this comes into play. Anecdotally this middle school age is also the point where more of the teachers that kids have regular interaction with are male. And those male teachers are more strongly drawn to the STEM subjects. There is a certain stigma attached to being a male elementary school teacher. These teachers of young children are often seen as being glorified babysitters. At Pea’s school, for example, there are only two male teachers and one of them teaches physical education. These numbers grow exponentially as we move into middle and high school classrooms. This makes me wonder how much having male teachers calling on male students more than female students also plays into this. Call on them to keep them focused and on task, call on them in some kind of bonding activity, call on them so that it doesn’t seem like they are singling out girls….there are a multitude of possibilities.
And for all of these reasons (and so many more) I worry about my beautiful, smart, math loving daughter. How long will she rush home asking to do her math homework first. How long will she do math problems in stores to help figure out how many items we need to buy just because? How long will she want to snuggle in bed and play with kiddie coding apps for fun? How long will she want to be the next “Dr. B.”? But these are questions that I don’t want to waste my precious mama-daughter time on. Right now the only thing I can do is try to counter these factors. I can nurture her love and I can snuggle up in bed with her while we code.
