How does she do it all?
Image: iStock/Avesun
-
Gravity's Engines
We’ve long understood black holes to be the points at which the universe as we know it comes to an end. Often billions of times more massive than the Sun, they...
Read More »
Many readers may remember Danica McKellar as Winnie Cooper on The Wonder Years. Some may know her as the author of the Chayes-McKellar-Winn Theorem in mathematical physics. Nowadays, she’s hoping that young girls will see her as a cool ambassador of math. In her newly released book, “Girls Get Curves,” McKellar explains why geometry is worth knowing: it promotes logical thinking and reveals why diamonds are shiny! Hmmm.
Some call this patronizing. (Where’s the boy math book filled with explosions and trucks? Or is “boy math” just…you know…math?). But many more love McKellar’s message: girls can and should do math. Besides, “Curves” is the fourth in a best-selling series, so something about this approach is sticking. And hers is not the only example. In 2010, the Society of Women Engineers co-designed Computer Engineer Barbie, hoping she could make engineering seem “cool” to young girls.
A more recent example was less well received. In June, the EU Commission’s “Women in Research and Innovation” campaign released a video called “Science: It’s a Girl Thing.” In the video, clicking high heels give way to three slender, skirted silhouettes. An attractive male scientist takes notice over his microscope. Images flash over a dance-y beat: lipstick interchanged with test tubes, girls giggling and posing and blowing kisses. One even writes something on a whiteboard. Science!
The video was scrapped. Many found the obvious stereotyping offensive, but there are scientific reasons to doubt the video would work as intended. Recent psychological research suggests that girlifying science may not be the best way to get girls thinking about careers in science, technology, engineering, and math (also called “STEM”). And, thankfully, the research also offers specific suggestions for what might work better.
Before considering what a girly science video might do to young girls, one might wonder where the idea came from. This meme seems concerned with whether girls feel like they will fit in (or want to fit in) with typical mathematicians and scientists. In McKellar’s “Hot X: Algebra Exposed,” the book preceding “Girls Get Curves,” she shared her own hesitations: “I had an image stuck in my head of who could be really good at math—nerdy guys who would grow up to look like Einstein—and I simply didn't look the part.”
But the concern about fit goes beyond the image of mathematicians as male. There is also a stereotype that the women who do make it into math and science are somehow unfeminine. “Teva-wearing frumps,” as Marie Claire magazine put it. This unfeminine reputation matters: geeky computer scientists zap women’s interest in the major, and the pursuit of romance goals (e.g., love and marriage) puts women off of math. It’s easy to get behind the message being sent by STEM professionals like McKellar and the engineers behind Barbie: girly girls can love math and science, too.
However, when Dr. Denise Sekaquaptewa and I put “glamorous” STEM role models to the test, the results were not promising. In our study, middle school girls received one of four packets containing interviews and photos of three college women. One quarter of the girls saw feminine STEM role models: women wearing pastel-colored clothes and make-up, described as successful in math or science and fond of fashion magazines. The rest of the girls saw role models with some combination of these features: women who were good at STEM, but not particularly feminine (wearing plainer clothes, simply enjoying reading); feminine women who were smart, but not explicitly in STEM; or not-so-girly women succeeding in non-STEM fields.
Rights & Permissions
See what we're tweeting about
22 Comments
Add CommentThe problem with trying to "girlify" science is that it plays into the stereotype that there is such a thing as "masculine" and "feminine", and that science is inherently masculine. Instead of trying to fight stereotypes, ignore them. Stop playing to stereotypes. Just show women of all types, working together. Give the girls options to let each girl find the role model that speaks to them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThese guys need to catch up to what Hollywood and romance writers have known for a long time: the image we like is a person who we can identify with, someone who is ordinary and imperfect, attracts an idealized person of the opposite sex. So I think what would work best is an ordinary good-looking woman doing some worthwhile STEM research being liked and admired by an awesome guy.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't see why it would not work. Barbie and Ken could go to exotic places and solve engineering problems using mathematical hieroglyphics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSimply find out what little girls dream about and fill that role using a scientist. (OK I realize princess and bride are out but reality must intrude at some point.)
My experience in high school was that few boys were interested in science, and even fewer girls. It seems to me that the experiments described had little chance of success because they were directed at the general population which would show no significant interest in science under any conditions.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisScience requires an inquiring and disciplined mind that most people do not have nor would even want to have. The task of recruiting more scientists, including girls, needs first to identify those who are capable of thinking scientifically and then offering encouragement and support that draws them away from the influence of their non-scientific peers.
At a deeper level, early education needs to present science and especially math in a positive way. I believe that elementary grade teachers are often afraid of mathematics (especially fractions and long division) and subconsciously instill that fear in their students. Providing properly trained math teachers is the first step in increasing science participation.
Diana Betz,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre you certain "Some [readers] may know her [Danica McKellar] as the PhD-bearing author"?
Your article is the 1st I've read in which it's asserted the talented Ms. McKellar has a PhD.
Modeling begins earlier. We cannot fill Elementary Schools with female teachers trained exempt from real science and math since they were "only education majors" and expect girls to grow up thinking of scientific thought as part of their adult life. In fact both genders could benefit from teachers with more rigorous education.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDear Benschmidt,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would hate to be a pedant but 'Ms'. McKellar worked hard for her PhD, perhaps we should respect that and address her as Dr. McKellar if we're going to refer to her by her title.
Kind Regards,
Louise.
Louise, there is no evidence anywhere else online that she has above a bachelor's degree. This includes her website, the Mathematics Genealogy Project as well as the UCLA mathematics list of technical reports, all of which should have a record, if indeed she has a PhD. In short, her title is 'Ms.' McKellar.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is not to disparage her contribution to mathematics, or to mathematics education, but a simple matter of getting titles correct. :)
Regards,
Cory.
A quick trip to Wikipedia will also verify that Ms. McKellar is not a PhD, and co-wrote the paper as an undergrad - though this should not be sneezed at since you rarely see an undergrad with their name on a theorem, let alone an Erdos-Bacon number.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSend your young girls to the UC Davis Geology Department. We are chock full of the XX side of humanity, fitting all descriptions, and they (as almost all geologists, actually) are super-pumped about doing their science. It's an honor to work among them.
go to maker shed if you want boys math and physics books with explosions and fun.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Where’s the boy math book filled with explosions and trucks?"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisObjection! We have that, it's called Star Trek!
Louise and Diana Betz,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy point being, of course, that it was dismaying to encounter a factual error two sentences into an article posted under the masthead of Scientific American.
I note the error has since been corrected.
As a parent of a young girl and a young boy, who has spent my career in engineering, I do find the message of Girls Get Curves patronizing. I hope girls find science fun because they can build a Mars Rover, not because they can design a new kind of lipstick!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut on the other hand I was part of the grassroots SWE support for the software engineer Barbie, not because it makes Barbie into a role model for STEM careers, but because a doll toting a laptop and a stylish but nerdy t-shirt with ones and zeros and a jacket with circuit boards on the sleeves is *so* much better than a doll whining "math is hard" or Airhead Nail Salon Stylist Barbie or something. It's more of a little bit of nerd pride, an embracing that even Barbie can wear a geeky t-shirt, and a little bit of reducing my sense that Barbie is only passing on insipid messages to our kids.
I did my Master's thesis on this. As a woman who completed my BS Electrical Technology at Purdue, then worked as an engineer for a number of years, then taught Electrical Technology to community college students and computer/robotics/math classes to K-12 students, I have lived this reality!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYes, there are very specific, research (and simple human physiology) based differences between male and female problem-solving strategies. The hormonal "soup" our brains are bathed in differentiate the minute our gonads do in our mothers' wombs, and that leads to brain activity that is very different in the female brain than in the male brain when solving technical problems. Doesn't mean women "can't" do STEM...it means we do it differently. Where in men, the frontal lobe (and pretty much ONLY the frontal lobe) is active during logical problem-solving, in women, the frontal lobe (a bit less active than men) is secondary to the parietal lobe, which manages such functions as context, verbal functions, and memory. Add to that the socialization of girls vs boys, and what works best to teach girls turns out to be somewhat of a different curriculum style than what works for boys. Our STEM curriculums are largely still set up in the same formats they've been for the past 100 years, when we needed men to go into STEM fields and didn't so much consider women (homemakers, etc) for these roles. There has been much success in setting up separate curriculums for girls/women that emphasize story-telling, group work, projects that have meaning to their lives (rather than more "cold" problems they have no connection to), and incorporating music, art, and play. Once you get past the fears,anxieties, and basic learning of the important principles, you can then put girls into a more standard format class and they will do just as well as the boys, overall.
Now, if we can just change industry so woman-centered values are more equally represented!
how to encourage girls who might have some potential in STEM:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-take them to science museums
-if they have an interest in a certain field, encourage it, get them books and toys relating to it
-don't force them to be overly girly if they don't want to
I liked birds, bugs, and dinosaurs, so I played with that stuff. I had one Barbie, I only played with her horse. I would not have liked a computer science Barbie, that sounds even more boring that a regular Barbie!
~Doctoral candidate in entomology
Well, now that we have the academic snobbery out of the way, we might want to ask why a woman who wants to enjoy financial success, could be a CEO of her own corporation and be highly admired for her achievements would want to spend her time in "the old boys playhouse" with a some men who can be horribly rude.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPerhaps a requisite to this article might be to ask anyone who is serious about women entering the world of science to read The End of Men which outlines current trends in women's achievements.
As a Mom who taught her daughter who could care less about science everything she'd ever need to know about earthquakes (placing her at the top of her science class) yet is a high maintenance beautiful young woman, I don't mind sharing with you it's not easy to interest young women in science unless you make it fun.
And I can gladly say she loves attempting to be there when it happens and has no fear of earthquakes, but tells everyone about them.
BTW she chose a career path in fashion over science.
Later this afternoon, I will be going up to the local forest to set Sherman traps for a survey of mammal abundance and species richness. The purpose of this study is both to see how this population of mammals has changed or stayed the same over the past eight years, and also to introduce my seventh grade science students to the techniques used by ecologists and wildlife biologists. In two weeks, we will go back and sample the vegetation, and see if we can see a relationship between the mammals we find and the habitat they live in.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSomehow I manage to spark an interest in biology - both for my boys and my girls - without having pink Sherman traps, or exploding Sherman traps, without wearing make-up myself, and without thinking I need to wear stylish clothing from Forever 21. (Besides, I am 43.)
I think I am successful with my students not because I am trying to appear attractive to them (One of the early comments mentioned showing an attractive female science attracting an attractive male scientist - I find that so shallow). Rather, my success comes in connecting with each of my students as individuals, encouraging them, listening them, and showing them what it means to be a scientist. My background is science, not education (other than the fifth year required for licensure plus a masters degree), or even environmental education or science education, and as such, I think I can model what it means to be a Scientist-in-residence within my middle school.
I grew up in the 1970s and I teach middle school students and have two small daughters at home right now. What I see is an OVERWHELMING and modern gender divide that did not exist in the same way when I was growing up. Our mothers may have been fighting for work place equity, the ERA, and Title IX passed when I was quite young, but to a kid, there was more middle ground in how to be a girl. I could state that my favorite color was orange, and not be ostracized. I could play with Legos without them being pink. The bike I learned to ride on was blue and no one accused me of trying to be a boy.
Right now there is so much pressure from clothing and toy companies and also adult media ("What Not To Wear" comes to mind) that there is almost no middle ground for boys and girls growing up. It is socially reinforced.
I would have been insulted as a child if a teacher had tried to interest me in science, which I already liked anyway, by using pink, or lipstick, or women who were scientists who liked fashion magazines.
What happened to inner beauty? No one teaches this anymore.
So if boys and girls learn differently, why not put them in separate classes and let them learn their own way? That would also eliminate the opposite sex as a distraction in junior high and high school.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank you cryofpaine that was exactly what I was going to say!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's the ridiculous idea that there are such things as 'femininity' and 'masculinity' that's at the root of all this waste of talent.
There's terrible frustration and sometimes desperate suffering when people feel that if they do what they enjoy they'll only get disapproval or worse because they've broken some stupid stereotype.
I just don't believe in 'femininity' and 'masculinity'. They're inventions to keep us all in our places. There are just people, men and women, with all the wonderful rich diversity of people shared among us all. There's no such thing as 'what girls like' or 'what boys like'. There may be some genuinely inherent broad statistical differences between boys as a group and girls as a group - though we can't know what they are because children aren't living in the same environment. We treat boys and girls differently, and they can see that our society divides us up and treats men and women differently - there's no control group. But even if there are those statistical differences, any one individual could have characteristics that are exactly the same as somebody of the other gender, both because individual human beings have so much in common and because there's so much variety. People should be treated as individuals, not as members of groups. Isn't that one of the basic requirements for freedom and human rights?
We should all be free to follow what we want to do, in whatever combinations (as long as we don't cause any harm to others of course).
But how to change these stupid harmful insulting stereotypes?
The BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) doesn't have a good record on gender and age balance on television - there have been very few older women until recently - but things have got much better now. There are now many women scientists (and historians and other professional academics) on the BBC, both television and radio.
One of the best bits of BBC science broadcasting recently has been 'The Life Scientific' with physicist Jim Al-Khalili on Radio 4.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015sqc7
He's talked with a wide range of scientists, and the discussions have often been not just fascinating and illuminating but funny as well.
I found myself reacting very negatively to the whole idea of Barbie-like videos promoting science for girls. As a woman with a life-long interest in science (and in men!) I don't identify with overly feminine women. I even find their behavior disturbing because it seems so artificial and occasionally pathetic. I'm certainly not the only woman who reacts this way. The women I know who love science are not nerds either. The one trait we share is being very independent. Perhaps I'm being unfair to the video since I haven't seen it. But it sounds as though it is taking a stereotype that many females see as demeaning
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisand assuming it will promote an interest in science. Perhaps the video is not that bad, but referring to it as "Barbie" science sure raised that picture in my mind!
It has nothing to do with the image of science or the scientist but all with the way math and physics are taught on high school level. A good teacher and an interesting way of teaching can do everything to students whatever gender they have.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMath and physics are often taught in a borring nearly esotherical way. And there is often the fear of failure, lack of concentration because it is often impossible to listen to the teacher and his subject. I was lucky to have had a physics teacher that was interesting, who could make his subject come alive. He pointed out to the important connection between mathematics and physics, the class was always alive and alert. Every student (in our class) went to the university to study either science or engineering. One man or woman can make the difference to a lot of students. Because of that teacher I changed my direction towards mathematics and logic, I was even able to pull my best friend into mathematics. We are both university researchers in the mathematics department. We were both bad math students in the first two years of high school, one teacher changed that, he inspired us, he gave us confidence ! You can spent millions of dollars on commercials, that would never have happened to us, never ever.
IslandGardener... what benefit is it to ignore the science and try to shove everyone into some gender-neutral box?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this