It’s Simple as 1,2,3

When I was in 9th grade, Geometry was my favorite subject. I was bored in English and History (my perennial faves), but Mr. Refkin, brought out of retirement to fill a gap in the math department, inspired me. I was proving theorems like Pythagoras himself, I thought. I was fascinated by the visualization of shapes; it clicked. I loved math.

But this bravado didn’t last. I spent the next three years struggling with math demons. A’s were followed by C’s in quick succession, bringing me to the heights of ecstasy and the depths of despair. A few topics in Calculus and PreCalc piqued my interest, and once I even spent a history class trying to solve a math problem with glee. But usually it was the other way around; math class was absorbed by writing sonnets, and I left without having understood the material. I refused to do homework, sometimes even to study. By the end of senior year, I was so absent even when present, that my math teacher asked my twin brother what was going on. My brother, who remained in honors math with considerably more ease, just shrugged. It was just me.

Meanwhile, he was beginning to lose faith in our AP english class. Without enough time to devote to his papers, he dashed them off. He was disappointed with the grade he received on a creative project (his were somewhat lewd but hysterical epigrams), and the vast majority of his classmates were an in-crowd of theory-spouting women. He didn’t really like them. Although he’d been an A English student, he turned his attention elsewhere.

In the past couple of weeks, University President Lawrence H. Summers has ushered the issue of gender and subject matter into the spotlight. In response, I’ve gone back to high school memories to wonder about what happened in our halls—about why there were always so few girls in AP physics or in the schools’ student government, about why this bothered everyone so much that when I was a junior, a bunch of us staged a day-long walkout and rally to bemoan gender inequality in school. The most controversial aspect of the rally was that we posted “ratios” around the hallways, such as “ratio of males to females who have been student body president—16:1” and “ratio of men to women in AP English 1:4.” Men in particular were incensed: “It’s not our fault that women can’t get elected,” they’d say. Or, “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, in our day and age, we were still making such divergent choices. What pressures were siphoning us off. Why talented girls were constantly crying over bad math tests in the hallways (it was like an epidemic) and guys swore that they just didn’t “get” poetry.

My theory then, as it is now, was that my failure in math was due to a pre-emptive fear of failure. My guess is that many young women are similarly uncomfortable with the aggressive risk-taking associated with math and the physical sciences, and are afraid to fill in that blank space with the wrong answer. In my opinion, this is because, for American girls, the value of keeping up an appearance of perfection is often ingrained very early.

In my math class, the boys shrugged off bad grades and vowed to study harder, but for me, a C penetrated into my very soul, affecting my self-confidence and ability to enjoy the class. My parents had encouraged me to do math, but somewhere along the line, I absorbed society’s expectations, and internalized them. I think many girls reading this will relate. Every test became a “will I fail?”—and therefore meant so much more than it should have. Many of my friends rode the same emotional rollercoaster when it came to math, even though they were more science-oriented than otherwise.

And as for poetry, a form invented, and some say perfected, by men (the pen is still supposed to be a metaphorical penis, feminists argue) changing mores have chased guys away from the humanities. In high school, talking about books means talking about feelings: you know, love, despair and loneliness, not to mention race and gender and, uh-oh, are we supposed to be drawing insights about ourselves here? Stop! Stop! That’s so…gay. Or wussy. Or whatever word is currently a substitute for “non-masculine.” Although my brother developed a crush on Lizzy Bennet in 11th grade English, many guys developed a distaste for literature. And it didn’t stop in high school. My English seminars remain ridiculously estrogeny, to the detriment, in my opinion, of everyone’s understanding of literature.

I put forth my experience because if we all look into our pasts, we can watch ourselves get socialized into gendered ways of thinking, even women in physics who have to deal with being “women in physics” or those alluring male VES concentrators. We either embrace the norm or defy it. But what if there was no norm? What if all girls could be sure that they could “get” physics, and guys were sure they could “get” poetry? Would we line up in equal numbers to pursue every profession? Probably not. But as Larry Summers should have known, until that opportunity presents itself, innate differences are not even worth talking about.

Sarah M. Seltzer ’05 is an English concentrator in Lowell House. Her column appears on alternate Fridays.