Busting the myth of the math gender gap

1. 1. 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 The Nurses and attendants staff we provide for your healthy recovery for bookings 
2. 2 `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. The Nurses and attendants staff we provide for your healthy recovery for bookings 
3. 3. 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? The Nurses and attendants staff we provide for your healthy recovery for bookings 
4. 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?“ The Nurses and attendants staff we provide for your healthy recovery for bookings 
5. 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. The Nurses and attendants staff we provide for your healthy recovery for bookings 
6. 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. The Nurses and attendants staff we provide for your healthy recovery for bookings 

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