"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.