Why Am I Afraid of Math?
By: Agents Of Change
Tags: Stereotypes, Gender Roles, Sexism, Gender Politics, Gender

I was a child in love with books. Somewhere along the line, I’d estimate 7th grade, the fact that I was good at reading and writing began to eclipse any other talents I might have developed. Advanced English and social studies classes absorbed all the energy I had for academic pursuits, and math and science were relegated to the minimum I could get away with and still get into college. I gave up on the desire to enjoy the challenge those subjects offered, partly out of the belief that I should play to my strengths. Numbers took work, while words were easy, so numbers got the axe.

In fourth grade, much to my pre-adolescent embarrassment, my dad started an afterschool math club. He brought in logic puzzles, brainteasers, and probability games to show us the “cool” side of math. That same year, after I vehemently expressed my desire to polish rocks (to what end, I’m unclear), I received a rock tumbler for Christmas. I never used it. There were numerous museum trips, faux-volcano kits, and IMAX movies about the solar system. There were books about Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace, and anthologies mythologizing other giantesses of math and science. We had a telescope in the backyard and virtually every National Geographic since 1965. I did not grow up in a science-deprived household.

Yet, when the eighth-grade math fair rolled around and my peers investigated angles in billiards or the statistical likelihood of a Boardwalk landing in Monopoly, I intentionally sought out the least math-y subject on the list: the art of M.C. Escher. In high school, I dodged calculus by taking an advanced statistics class taught by a notoriously disengaged teacher. I was afraid that faced with “real” math (like calculus), I wouldn’t do as well as a kid as smart as me was supposed to do.

And then, in college, at an institution that prides itself on providing a high-quality liberal arts education, I wiggled out of heavy-duty math yet again. I picked a class on number theory, which sounded sufficiently wordy to my uneducated ears. To everyone’s surprise, most of all my own, I rocked that class. For the first time in a math class, I was the kid who ruined the curve. My instructor circled my midterm grade and wrote “Wow!!!”; I emailed a picture of that comment to my parents. I started to wonder where I ever got the idea I was bad at math.

I’m done with school, and I’ve never taken calculus. At each fork in the academic road, I opted out of tough math and science classes. I thought that math didn’t “come naturally” to me and the challenge it offered was one I wasn’t interested in confronting. The truth is that I played it safe.

The other undeniable truth is that math is presented in pop culture as particularly challenging and unappealing to girls. This week the internet lost its collective shit over a JCPenny t-shirt that has since been discontinued. The shirt reads, in sparkly letters, “I’m too pretty to do homework so my brother has to do it for me.” You can still purchase a different tee with a big “My Best Subjects” and checkboxes with “boys,” “music,” “shopping” and “dancing.” Forever 21 sells magnets that say “Too Pretty for Math.” My parents would never have bought this crap for me, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t see it and absorb it growing up. In 1992, when I was five, Mattel released the Teen Talk Barbie that uttered, among other things, “Math class is tough!” Thankfully, my parents didn’t buy me this either.