Girls, Math and the Fear of Failure

In the midst of the uproar over gender touched off by Harvard’s president, Lawrence H. Summers, I have found myself going back to high school memories and wondering why talented girls were constantly crying over bad math tests in the hallways.

When I was in ninth grade, geometry was my favorite subject. But this bravado didn’t last, and I spent the next three years struggling with math demons. A’s were followed by Cs in quick succession. I liked a few areas in calculus; once I even spent a history class gleefully trying to solve a math problem. But usually it was the other way around -- math class was absorbed by secretly writing sonnets in my notebook, and I left without having understood the material.

As I fell behind, I often gave up, refusing to do homework or to study. The boys in my math class shrugged off bad grades and vowed to study harder, but for me a C penetrated into my very soul, undermining my confidence and ability to enjoy the work. Every test became an agonizing challenge to my self-esteem -- Will I fail? -- and therefore meant far more than it should have.

My twin brother, meanwhile, was losing faith in our advanced-placement English class. Most of his classmates were part of an “in crowd” of theory-spouting girls; he didn’t like them. For a creative project, he wrote a series of lewd but hysterical epigrams -- and he was disappointed with the grade he received. Although he had been an A student in English, he turned his attention elsewhere.

The disparity between our interests was hardly an anomaly. The boys we knew swore they didn’t “get” poetry, while most of the math “honors dropouts” were female. These girls had initially shown both aptitude and zest for the subject, but many were happy to drop down to regular math because they didn’t want to face the constant threat of disaster they had experienced in honors, where everyone gets the occasional bad grade.

When I was a junior, a bunch of us staged a daylong walkout to bemoan gender inequality in a school that, despite its academic excellence, perennially had few girls in AP physics classes or in student government. The most controversial aspect of our rally were the “ratios” we posted in the hallways: the ratio of males to females who had been student body president -- 16 to 1; the ratio of men to women in AP English -- 1 to 4.

The guys in particular were incensed. “It’s not our fault that women can’t get elected,” they said. “It’s not our fault that women can’t do physics.” Well, no. But that wasn’t our point. The point was -- and is -- to ask ourselves why males and females are still making such divergent choices.

My theory is that my “failure” in math was due to a preemptive fear of failure. For girls, the value of keeping up an appearance of perfection is ingrained early, and most girls really, really don’t like getting Cs, just as they hate having pimples or dirt on their jeans. The exacting nature of math forces girls to confront the limits of their crafted perfection.

Though getting good grades has become the social norm for girls, being outstandingly brilliant has not. Many young women are scared to demonstrate the aggression, the try-and-fail risk-taking found in many disciplines, but most markedly in advanced math and sciences. It makes them worry about seeming unfeminine. It makes them worry that other girls and boys won’t like them.

This gender corralling works both ways; boys don’t want to step outside of their gender norms either. Talking about books means talking about feelings. As a result, the once-male world of literary criticism has become markedly female at the undergraduate level -- to the detriment of everyone’s understanding of literature.

It’s not the girls’ fault or the boys’ fault. But it is our collective responsibility to change this.

What if there was no norm? What if all girls were unafraid to keep trying until they “got” physics, and guys weren’t afraid to “get” poetry? Would we line up in equal numbers to pursue every field? Probably not. But as Summers should have known, until that opportunity presents itself, innate differences are not even worth talking about.