BAUTISTA: Stop telling women we don’t belong in STEM

Growing up, I never felt unwelcome, inept or alienated from my peers in mathematics class. A love for numbers was something my parents and I shared. They saw my blossoming potential and hungry mind and were eager to water it, teaching me my multiplication tables early and helping me figure out strategies for solving puzzles in an online math game assigned by my school. Math has always been my favorite subject, and I looked forward to that class period each day at school for twelve years of my life. In the math classroom, I knew I was competent. Of course, I still had so much to learn, but I was confident in my own abilities and the support system that I had.

But I’m disappointed to admit I can’t say the same about my Vanderbilt math classes. 

The first math class I took at Vanderbilt was MATH 1300, which is Calculus I. This course is notoriously difficult, often branded as a “weed-out” by students who have taken it. It did not fail to live up to its reputation. While I struggled in MATH 1300, my saving grace was undoubtedly the community I found there. My professor heavily emphasized the value of collaboration and encouraged us to work together on practice problems, so my classmates and I made a group chat in the first week of classes and met regularly throughout the semester to support each other through homework and exam prep. When I was taking Calculus II and III, I experienced a similar sense of community that was more than an array of other brains I could collaborate with to solve problems. Whether I realized it or not at the time, it was a support system, a group of peers that helped me see that I was not alone in my arduous quest to master mathematics.

Shortly after this semester began, I got a bitter taste of what my future math classes would look like. I walked into a new classroom for a new semester, eager to see what my new math class — this time, Differential Equations — would hold, only to find that I was one of only three or four women enrolled in my class of 20 people. Math has always been my academic niche, but I suddenly felt out of place. Although this unbalanced ratio came as a shock to me this semester, in retrospect, it really shouldn’t have. Introductory calculus courses are an entry-level prerequisite for many areas of study at Vanderbilt, including economics, engineering and the pre-medical track. Because so many students are required to take a calculus course, I encountered students from a variety of majors, even though I am a mathematics major. With such a mixed bag of disciplines, I never really noticed a disparity in the gender ratio in my classes. I realized that as the difficulty of my math courses increased, the number of women who took them had significantly dwindled.

Women in male-dominated fields undoubtedly are likely to feel more pressure to succeed because there are fewer of us and it can feel like we represent our gender in these fields. This gender disparity present in fields like mathematics is a known and widespread phenomenon, which raises several questions. Why does it exist in the first place, and what are its effects on women in these fields?

In an article called “The Brilliance Trap,” Andrei Cimpian of New York University and Sarah-Jane Leslie of Princeton University discuss the results of a pioneering study exploring the relationship between stereotypes about genius and the proportion of women and minorities in academic fields. Cimpian and Leslie surveyed nearly 2,000 academics by email across 30 fields to determine if and to what degree these academics believed that “some form of exceptional intellectual talent was necessary for success in their field.” They used a measure called the field-specific ability belief index to gauge how much people think natural talent, rather than effort, is needed to succeed in an academic field. Then they cross-referenced this with the gender demographics of each field. The results were striking.

“Fields that placed more value on brilliance also conferred fewer Ph.D.s on women,” Cimpian and Leslie wrote. “The greater the emphasis on this single fixed trait, the fewer doctoral degrees were awarded to… [this] group.”

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