Issue of
February 10, 1999

Girls: ‘If I’m a good student overall, I can’t be good at math’

BY KATHLEEN O'TOOLE

"Yes, Viriginia, there is a downside to getting good grades in English."

No high school counselor is likely to make such a remark to a student, but it would not be an unreasonable caution, according to results of a new Stanford study of high school students. The study found that high school girls are more likely than boys to be distracted from pursuing higher-paying careers in math and science fields if they also perform well in English courses.

In other words, if they perceive themselves as all-around "good students," girls tend not to think of themselves as skilled in quantitative fields and are less likely than those who are uniquely good in quantitative subjects to say they hope to major in a science or engineering field.

Shelley Correll, a former high school chemistry teacher, conducted the survey research along with Professor Cecilia Ridgeway as part of Correll's work toward a doctorate in sociology. The study, funded by Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender, included both a one-time survey of students in six Bay Area high schools and an analysis of data collected over several years on a national sample of students who were eighth graders in 1988. It is part of a larger project that Correll hopes will provide greater insight into why, despite the changing nature of paid work, women and men still seem to wind up in sex-segregated fields or specialties, with men usually dominating the higher paid categories.

"The engineering and physical science fields stand out as striking examples of where [gender segregation] has not changed, so I'd like to think that some of the things I study in that area could be applied to thinking about how males and females also wind up in differing legal or medical specialties," Correll said. Women, for example, tend to be concentrated in general practice medicine, while men dominate specialties like surgery.

Correll, who majored in chemistry at Texas A&M, was the only female chemist on an 80-member project team during her first job for a chemical company after college. She then taught Advanced Placement chemistry in a Houston suburb for six years. Teaching at an academically competitive high school, she had many good students of both genders but was surprised to observe what seemed like differing reactions of boys and girls to the grades they earned. It was common, she says, for a female student who had earned A's most of the time to say she wasn't good at chemistry, or math and science in general, after earning a B or a C on one exam. Boys, in contrast, she said, would often get C's repeatedly and yet tell their teachers or counselors they thought they were good in science and math but just hadn't tried very hard.

"They seemed to have a very different way of approaching what I would have thought of as evidence of their skill ­ the grades they were receiving and the feedback they were getting from their teachers and counselors," Correll says. Each year several of her male students went on to pursue science and engineering degrees at universities like Cal Tech or Stanford, but none of her best female students pursued this so-called "math path."

This bothered Correll, although she is careful to say she does not think all of the best students should pursue careers in quantitative fields.

"Some of the math-path [research] literature has a tone that is frustrating to me," she says. "I read a book recently called Lost Talent, which almost implies that if women don't go on to become scientists and engineers their talent has been wasted. I certainly don't believe that. I just think people should be able to make the choice. To do that, they need to recognize their skill as skill."

A host of research literature attempts to explain the gender gap in quantitative fields, Correll said. In general, it indicates that women make slightly better grades than men do in math classes and men have slightly better test scores. "If you compare the studies, however, they are not consistent. Sometimes people find these differences, sometimes they don't. Sometimes they favor women, and sometimes men, but the differences are always small. It's never been clear to me how such small differences [in academic performance] could explain such a large difference in outcome."

In her search for a better answer, Correll said she first rejected as "too simplistic" a common explanation ­ that young people see mathematics as masculine. Correll says she didn't realize herself as a high school student that chemistry was overwhelmingly male at the professional level. "My experience from talking to students is that they don't seem to be aware that engineering is way more commonly done by men, and they certainly don't seem to expect, as adults learn along the way, that boys should do better at math. Math is simply seen as a school subject, so I felt the explanation has to be a lot more complicated."

Armed with exposure to Ridgeway's theoretical and empirical work on how cultural beliefs about social status are created and reinforced, Correll decided to investigate how gender might serve as "an anchor of identity across situations and contexts." In the classroom, she argues, both males and females see themselves primarily as students in a largely shared school environment. Their gender identity, shaped by shared cultural meanings, is in the background but affects how the individual sees her or his multiple tasks and role identities fitting together.

In the surveys, Correll found, for instance, that high school boys who think of themselves as "good students" are more likely to think of themselves as skilled at math than girls who think of themselves as good students. "Girls are more likely to see themselves as someone who works hard and is diligent and has success for those reasons," she said. This may be partly because parents, counselors and teachers tend to expect girls to be better behaved and disciplined in school, she says.

High school students of both sexes evaluate mathematics similarly in terms of its power and value, Correll found, but boys see English as much less valuable than girls see it. In one sense, then, it may be that boys are restricting their career choices more than girls are, she said. But on other questions, both girls and boys give males a higher rating in "power" than females and give women a higher rating on "goodness."

"In looking at the whole academic context, it seems to be the case that it's more important for females to be uniquely good at math. To the extent that they make good grades in all of their subjects, they are less likely to think of themselves as being skilled in mathematics. For boys, if they have good grades across subjects, they think of themselves as skilled in mathematics."

What might adults do to encourage female students to recognize their quantitative skills and give more consideration to quantitative careers?

Correll suggests encouraging girls who have good grades in math to take calculus and to participate in activities like math contests and science fairs. "For all students, taking high school calculus greatly increases the odds that they will persist to become a scientist or engineer, but for females that seems to be more important," she said.

"Involvement in research in general, where they are actually seeing science done in a non-school setting, can be very helpful," she added. "Some of the programs run at Stanford by the Society of Women Engineers, for instance, involve having female students come in and talk with graduate students here to see the research they are doing.

"It's not just a matter of raising someone's self-esteem or making them feel better about themselves, but to actually see their skill as skill." SR