The air is breezy and warm, full of the remnants of summer on the first day of school. The excitement consumes the halls as the students talk about all of the new clubs they’re excited to join, with Libby Howard darting into Math Team.
But as the 50 minutes tick down, she continuously looks around the cold room, noticing how few girls are in there. As this discomfort increases, she ends up quitting the club after one meeting as what was once fun became boring and awkward.
Libby isn’t the only one to have gone through this experience. This isolation that girls experience in STEM is one reason why some ninth grade girls feel less confident about their performance in the math course Accelerated Advanced Algebra Trigonometry compared to others.
After interviewing 12 ninth grade students, seven male and five female, boys often said they were pretty confident about the course and their skills, whereas girls often said they were not that confident or gave a longer explanation about how they still make mistakes.
These longer answers could be attributed to thoughtfulness or overthinking.
Matthew Insalaco, U-High math teacher, believes this thoughtfulness with girls’ answers comes as a consequence of the lack of confidence.
“Students who identify as female are often more studious, more organized and they are usually more concise with their thoughts. There seems to be more careful thoughtfulness that goes into that,” Mr. Insalaco said. “Sometimes that careful thoughtfulness comes with some doubt or second guessing.”
Ninth grader Paige Mattiello experienced this same expectation of perfectionism. After the first day she already had thoughts of wanting to drop and was encouraged to by others when she became confused by the material.
“It just happened in math class when I looked at the paper and I was confused. I looked at everyone around me and looked around the room and everyone else looked like they understood. It seemed like only I was struggling and not understanding which freaked me out,” she said talking about the experience.
She said not understanding the material was a new experience for her, which inspired the thought of dropping. She was then encouraged by others around her to drop as well, which discouraged her.
Paige’s experience of being encouraged to drop because she didn’t understand new concepts immediately demonstrates the pressure and high expectations girls go through in AAAT which discourages them from continuing with the course.
Teachers have also noticed this lack of confidence in female students, especially during tests.
David Hartigan, U-High math teacher, said he notices when it comes to a test boys are more likely to say it was easy, whereas girls are more likely to downplay their experience, even if they ended up getting the same grade.
Paige said she felt really discouraged after the first test as it was not the high grade she was expecting.
“It was just really confusing because I felt so ashamed of the score. I felt like I shouldn’t tell people my score or I didn’t really understand the material as much as I thought I did, so that was a really big moment for me,” Paige said. “Like, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t be in this course because other people are scoring a lot higher than I am.’”
These are the negative consequences of the societal and cultural pressures with girls receiving higher expectations Mr. Insalaco talks about.
He said, “I think there’s some societal norms around the certain degree of perfectionism that we ask our female students to have that we don’t necessarily expect out of our male-identifying students.”
