Calculus and Being Well-Rounded
In her research, sociologist Shelley Correll found that young women who enrolled in high school calculus were about three times more likely than young women who did not take calculus to choose a quantitative major in college. In comparison, young men who enrolled in calculus were only about twice as likely as young men who did not take calculus to choose a quantitative major. Thus, it appears that taking calculus in high school is a better predictor of selecting a quantitative college major for women than it is for men.
Correll also found that higher verbal self-assessments decreased the odds of enrolling in calculus and choosing a quantitative major, indicating that students use relative understandings of their competencies when making career-relevant decisions. David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow (2006) showed that girls who do very well at math are more likely than their male peers to do very well at verbal tasks as well. In addition to societal expectations, relatively strong verbal abilities may encourage mathematically talented girls to consider future education and careers in the humanities or social sciences rather than science and engineering fields.
What do you think about this? Is it OK with you if mathematically talented girls who are also good at other things steer clear of science? Or should more effort be made to recruit them into science or engineering?
Marian,
Thanks for posting this comment. It's a point I've never heard put just that way, and I think you make a very compelling argument. It is important to steer girls who have aptitude in math and science toward math and science careers for the benefit of society. In the future when I'm asked why encouraging girls in STEM areas matters, I'm going to ask - do we need more poets and financial advisors or more scientists and engineers?
And Hmcbride2000, I like your point about how good verbal skills are essential to a scientific career. Also an excellent point. Thank you!
Young people need information to make good decisions. And if they are being influenced by outside expectations when they have high verbal abilities away from science, why shouldn't we make an effort to pull them back in by showing them how those verbal skills can be used to their advantage?
Being able to communicate well both in the written and spoken word are essential in science and engineering. Anyone who has tried to use a poorly written user manual or read a paper with exciting results and awful prose can tell you that much.
So what can we do as working female scientists and engineers to influence these young women? One option is to volunteer to give a "Day in the Life" talk to a HS pre-calculus or calculus class. Show them what we do. Talk about how we got there. And perhaps we'll see at least a few follow in our footsteps who might otherwise have gone a different direction.
Christi,
You have a very good point. We need to somehow "rebalance" societal expectations. Wiping the slate clean is not an option.
However, there is another side to this. Many of us believe that the US is heading toward perilous waters because of the paucity of its best and brightest who are following technical paths. One way of looking at it is to ask how much different would the world be in 50 years if our brightest students all decided to study English instead of Math and Engineering? What if the best quantitative students all pursue Finance? (Which seems to be where society is pushing them these days.) Where will US R&D be w.r.t. the rest of the world? We have outsourced manufacturing, we have almost finished outsourcing design. R&D is all that's left, and it may soon be off-shore as well.
Are poets more relevant to current society (and should they be) than engineers and scientists? I won't argue that we don't need both, but I think we need to rethink the balance. I wish there were an easy answer, but women have to be part of the solution.
Marian
Gemma,
That's a good way to put it. Wiping the slate clean isn't an option, and since we know there are societal expectations that push women away from science and engineering, why not offer incentives to balance those out?
Well, we can't simply wipe the slate clean to see if there exist gender contributions to career decisions (for either sex) that arise independently of societal expectations. Presently, we can assume societal expectations do influence a woman's career choice, and therefore I think we need to offer incentives to draw more women into these gender-skewed disciplines. Ultimately, we should aim to be a society where people work according to their greatest interests and talents, not according to enforced gender-roles.
