"It's okay to be smart," says dad. 'Pfft, yeah right,' thinks daughter.

It still boggles my mind that women are underrepresented in university applied and "hardest" sciences (math/physics) programs. People love to ask me about this phenomenon, and love to lend their two bits of causal explanation. I never know quite how to package a brief response. My genius friend, Jill, in Vancouver, is interested in teaching math to young girls to combat this trend. Neat!

Today I'm looking at how girls fared in university science and math programs in Canada in the 1980s - a decade when women poured into paid employment and higher learning institutions in unprecedented numbers, but stuck to humanities, social sciences and professional programs. Women and Education: A Canadian Perspective, a collection edited by Jane Gaskell and Arlene McLaren (1987), features a 4-chapter section on women's access to education, covering adolescent females relationship to computers, women's enrollment in university science programs, and working-class female high school course enrollment. The writing is full of forecasting about the status of women in these disciplines... fun to think about what has happened in terms of graduate enrollment since!

As I try to understand conflating factors that affect women's relative absence in engineering classes today, I wonder how girls experience choosing not to take math in high school. One factor suggested to affect women's science enrollment in university is lacking the high school prerequisites. We can poke holes in this idea (women's lack of interest/aptitude begins early on, it's innate, blah blah), but interestingly, girls don't lag behind boys in math until age 15 or 16. This makes me think there's more to the socialization side. To be bold: I remember being good at math in high school, great even. I was upset with myself if I didn't get the top mark in the class. I won a math competition in grade 10 and didn't tell anyone but my parents, and I wasn't shy. I also won regional science olympics with a team of 3 others, and bragged about how I didn't have a clue what was going on and somehow the team pulled me through. This is not what happened. I bossed my team around to the finish line. I remember my behaviour before most math tests. I strolled in late, looked for a pencil and a calculator, giggled a lot, and claimed, "OMG, I'm going to fail." I usually aced it and didn't tell anyone except my rivals, to whom it was cool to be smart (true to stereotype, it turns out those "rivals" are kicking ass in life's cool lane now). In university, I loved chemistry and math, but abruptly dropped out in third year, likely because I was afraid of failure and intimidated by the competitive atmosphere at UBC. What gives?

In the 80s, some psychologists (Meece et. al, 1982) tried to understand why women enroll in fewer math classes, even though they fare better in the ones in which they do enroll. Meece proposed a model about choice and performance (great for my dissertation!) with two factors: 1) the person's perception of the value of the task; 2) the person's expectancy of success. She categorized four attitudes affecting perception of value: intrinsic, utility, cost and fulfillment. Meece and her colleagues go further to complicate the "expectancy of success" with factors like perception of self, sex-role attitudes, one's own goals and perceptions of socializers attitudes. I like research like this... work that attempts to critically operationalize things that are, of course, confounding and difficult to measure. I'm too lazy to do this. Good for Judith Meece. From here, we can design surveys, explore attitudes, uncover cultural discourses, and begin to ask new questions.

Now considering how the "ideology of woman" deflects girls away from focused attention in mathematics. When it's cooler to be ditzy than smart, how can we attribute some innate propensity to adolescents? Yet the stereotype lives on.

confronting positive eugenicism

"What are you going to do when you're done?" - the question most asked of and dreaded by students of all kinds.

Though I always respond, "I don't know," my academic convictions have begun to mirror my personal interests, making academia an attractive career option. The imbrication of personal/political/academic makes for a great road sometimes. Nothing like experiential knowledge touching theoretical joys touching political stakes to stay enthralled in the journey.

Contrarily, when writing literature is tied to writing the self, fielding critique becomes a challenging exercise in resisting feeling personally attacked. I'm discovering that this is not a matter of compartmentalizing work and life, academic and personal. In my project, they bleed from the same vein. The fact is criticism of my research is a personal attack of sorts and the issue becomes how to cope when compartmentalizing is not possible or desirable.

My work was recently criticized for echoing pronatalism - the kind associated with imperialism, racism and eugenics. This...is not good. I take this critique and ask myself: why am I fighting for the right to be supported to have children when we have a problem of overpopulation and environmental crisis on this planet? Appreciating this at a philosophical level, I still want to ask my questions about the structural disenfranchisement of mothers in Canada. Mine is not a "life or death problem" (though it is in the Foucauldian sense of biolife and Puar's reiteration of necropolitics), but it's discrimination nonetheless. And if the institution of the school is a central generator of power relations (see Discipline and Punish), is not this an important system to interrogate?

Consumed with finding a way to reconcile this, I shunned a lunch to dig through pronatalist policies from Nazi Germany (you know I'm occupied when I shun a lunch). I tried to understand how my work differs from or reproduces these discourses or both. Given its reputation for macho nationalist rationale, Nazi population policy seemed an apt historical example to explore. In 1988, Robert Proctor wrote a book with the Harvard University Press called Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Chapter 5 is on the control of women.

I knew the machismo ideology of the regime, but couldn't have imagined to what extent. Family policies from criminalizing the abortion of a "German" fetus as a "racial crime" (a crime for which violators faced imprisonment) to the Honor Cross for German Motherhood (dollars and public props for babies), all intentioned the mass production of potential Nazi bodies. Policies targeted fathers too. Loans amounting to a year's salary were given to husbands whose wives agreed to leave paid labour for domestic life. For every child born, the principle was reduced on the loan by one quarter. By 1938, all public officials (men) (including academics) were required to marry or resign. These are only a couple of the masculine workfarist policies. Texts around standards of beauty and womanhood circulating through policies, media and political rhetoric enforced momism to the max.

Canada was reputed for pronatalism too. Small anecdote: in 1926, Toronto millionaire, Charles Millar, promised $700 000 to the woman who would have the most children by 1936 (The winner had 26 children by age 40. Holy...eff). As staggering as these incentives are to me, what is just as fascinating is the host of parallels between blatantly racist natalist policies in wartime Germany and contemporary family policy. Rewarding "upper"-class straight motherhood of the desired race for nationalist rhetoric is the obvious intention of pronatalist policies in wealthy nations like France, Japan and Canada. How do I defend my right to be assisted in raising my own children in this context? Maybe I shouldn't be. Help me out, y'all.