Why Women Tend to Hate Math
How I went to being a little girl who loved memorising times tables, to a teenager who couldn’t even look at them.
When I was 11, I was an absolute math addict. I loved learning math, memorising time tables, solving problems. It was all pretty logical to me, and something my brother always helped me with, seeing as he was two years ahead of me in school.
That’s when I met a professor that I will never forget. In our grade, math classes were divided into sets by skill and ability and I was luckily placed into set one, meaning I had more ease with maths. But that wasn’t how the teacher explained it.
He started by pointing out how the class was made up by 80–90% boys, using this statistic to show how boys are usually just naturally better at maths than girls. He said it was normal, and that we (girls) shouldn’t worry about it. Then he looked at the girls, all sitting by in one corner together, pens out, ready to learn, and explained that we were there because we put in greater effort to be there. And, though there was no shame in that, we did not have the natural talent the boys had, and neither will we ever have that. So in my mind I thought, why was I even trying?
I remember looking at my friends, a 13-year old at most listening to this. That was when my new life’s mission was to beat every boy in that class at mathematics, studying more and more until I got the highest grade. I stayed up late nights, forced myself to do better, put more effort in, until I did it. And I did.
The sad thing, however, is that math became more of an obligation to me than a class, and soon I started to hate it. I didn’t look at problems eager to solve them, I just wanted the quickest way to get it over with. And, when you do that, all the magic behind maths dissapears.
Worse, the professor who made such a mark on my life school left a couple of years later and didn’t get to see my success. I doubt it would change his perception, though my girlfriends and I from that class all wanted him to see us. We often beat the boys or tied them, and in class problems, we were quicker or smarter, a result of our restless hours of studying.
I often wonder what would have happened had I never crossed paths with that professor: would I meet another who would present the same challenge? Or would my love for math just naturally grow with time? Though some of my female peers took it as an incentive towards careers in STEM, the majority steered away from it, afraid that the professor’s opinion was right.
This is just my own personal experience with maths, and why I grew to hate it so much: I can’t generalise it to every single girl out there. I can barely look at number crunching today without feeling nauseous, which is probably a bad thing, and generalise any math-related subject to be pointless in my future career. Whatever I’ll do, I try to convince myself I’ll only need the basic math I have already learned in high school.
Nowadays, my mind does not even come to consider maths. Ever since that age, even younger, I always knew I wanted to ultimately be a writer, even if a math-loving one. I loved to note down experiences — a consequence of my reading habits — and writing down my thoughts, letting them wander around the page.
Honestly though, it is a pity. Only 22,3% of women graduate in core STEM subjects, less than a quarter of the female population, highlighting how under-encouraged and under-stimulated it is for women to be involved in the area. And there should be more women in STEM, not only to increase equality and whatnot, but because there are certain issues in technology that only women will be able to notice.
What I suggest is that people let girls and boys be. If they want to pursue math, let them. If they don’t, let them. Let them choose their path, even if they are the first ones to take it.
Just stop differentiating mental capability based on gender because, honestly, it really isn’t helping anyone here and it does seem kind of superfluous.
