I still remember the time when I decided I should ask my dad for help with my math homework, instead of my mom. My mom was a high school math teacher, and it didn’t take more than a glance for my dad to assure me she would be my best bet.
By this point, I’d spent my entire life listening to her help my older brother with complex math problems, so what made me think I should seek out someone different? I had plenty of evidence that she was familiar with the material.
It’s hard to say how much role gender bias had in that single incident, but a new Rutgers study shows that the gender stereotypes we hold regarding math skills affect kids as young as five, not only in how they see their own abilities, but in their trust for their teachers.
Testing Gender Bias In Math Learning
The study assigned five and six-year-old children estimation tasks in which they were to estimate the number of dots on a screen. First, they conducted their own estimation to establish a baseline. Then, each kid was assigned a pair of “friends” in the form of a male and female avatar, who would offer advice on what number to guess.
In each case, one avatar would provide a good estimate, and the other would overestimate. In some cases, the female avatar would be wrong, and in others, the male would. Kids would then make their own guess.
The results showed that children valued the male avatar’s input far more, even when his estimate was substantially off the mark, allowing him to sway their responses more than the female avatar.
In fact, after the avatars were removed and children returned to making estimates independently, their answers still differed from the baseline, indicating that the male avatar’s estimates had influenced them even when he was no longer providing input.
More Information About The Study
The study focused heavily on estimation tasks, with the authors noting that five is the age when children typically begin to connect numeric estimates to a visual representation.
The researchers also tested how kids responded to the avatars on a non-math memory task. In that case, they did not find that the children’s responses were strongly influenced by the avatars, and they did not find any evidence of gender bias in the responses.
The sample size was small, with only 64 kids, half of whom were girls. Notably, almost all (98%) of the parents reported having a college degree, so the participating children presumably had ample exposure at home to educated adults, both male and female.
Gender Stereotypes Teach Girls Math Is Inaccessible
We already know that social stereotypes teach girls that they’re not capable of learning math, or that boys are better at math than they are, and that these stereotypes actually affect math grades.
According to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, one study found that in classrooms where students hold these biased beliefs (the idea that boys are naturally better at math), boys perform better than girls on midterm tests, even when the girls received better scores earlier in the year.
Another study, published in Frontiers in Psychology in 2022, found that nearly half of teachers in training (48.2%)admit to holding certain biased (and false) beliefs about the abilities of boys and girls to learn math. The most shocking part of this? The teachers in training who were surveyed were predominantly women. Out of 303 surveyed, 242 were women.
There’s a clear risk that these teachers are taking those biased beliefs into the classroom, and reinforcing them (consciously or unconsciously) on yet another generation of children.
What Can Parents & Teachers Do To Combat These Stereotypes?
There are several strategies that teachers and parents can employ to help protect children from these biases and their negative effects, according to the Institute of Education Sciences.
One is to expose kids to female role models in math, such as the three women (Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan) immortalized in Hidden Figures, whose pencil-and-paper calculations at NASA made our first forays into space possible, and Maryam Mirzakhani, a Stanford University professor who was both the first woman and first Iranian woman to win the prestigious Fields Medal for complex geometrical theories that revolutionized mathematical research.
Shifting focus on how we praise children in math class is also key. Instead of praising mathematical success as a sign of natural talent, we should praise children for hard work and practice, thereby reinforcing a work ethic rather than stereotypes.
Most importantly, we should always be working to foster curiosity and interest, so that kids are actually invested in learning math procedures and finding answers, not just doing the work by rote for a grade.