The boys who intimidated me
I went to an all-girls high school. At the time, my high school didn’t have all of the upper-level AP* math and science classes that our "brother school" (the boys high school in the area) did. I had a neighbor who was one year ahead of me at the boys high school and was always bragging about his AP Physics and BC Calculus classes, not to mention his older brother who was doing a PhD in Physics at MIT, and I remember feeling quite intimidated. Meanwhile, I cobbled together a curriculum with my high school’s math teacher, who tried to teach me AP Calculus one-on-one despite not having seen the material since she was in college 20 years earlier.
My point here is not that I was math-deprived. My point is that I was intimidated by "science boys" from very early on. When I went to college, people warned me not to go to MIT, because the boys from Bronx Science would be way ahead of me. While I didn’t go to MIT (ugly campus, strong fraternity system– neither seemed appealing), the science boys came back to haunt me. When I went to Undergrad U, there were in fact a couple of guys from a similar science magnet school, who had apparently taken graduate-level math while still in high school. And I assumed that all the guys in my science classes were probably like my neighbor, and had taken "real" AP Calc and Physics. Though I ended up with really good grades at the end of my first semester, I assumed it was because I made up for my stupidity and lack of training my frequenting the TA’s office hours.
Meanwhile, other wackily advanced science boys presented themselves. For example, there was a Russian guy who was about 3 years ahead of everyone else in courses. And then there were all these annoying guys who had somehow finished the problem set 2 days earlier than anyone else and got to lord it over everyone else by carefully doling out hints to the answers. There were also some nice guys, who I did problem sets with — they weren’t jerks, though they were usually kind of nerdy.
Meanwhile, where were the girls?** Well, actually, there weren’t any. Oh sure, there were a few other girls in my classes (maybe 3 or 4 in a class of 50). But one was an econ major and doing math on the side, and the other was somehow not keeping up with everyone else and anyhow was a year younger and never washed her hair, and then another had chronic problems with not getting her work done, and the other one had some sort of weird health problem that made her skin grey (yeah, what was that?), and then there was my friend the superstar who was a year older than me and so good at doing her problem sets that she could go hang out in cool coffee shops the night before they were due, but anyway she went to high school in the former-Communist bloc so that was somehow a different story (hi r&o, if you’re reading!). Basically, all the other (small number of) women in my classes seemed so anomalous that it didn’t really feel like there were other women doing science.
For most smart American students, going to college is the time when you find out that you are not the smartest person in the world– that there are lots of people out there who are smarter than you. Suddenly you become a small fish in a big pond, and all that. But for smart American girls in math and science? Those "people" who are smarter than you are most likely boys (do the numbers!). And so the (quite reasonable) message that you aren’t the smartest person in the world can easily get confused with another message: boys are smarter than you. And somehow (at least for me) all those boys in the class getting worse grades than me didn’t seem to register. Whenever I had the fear that I wasn’t good enough or smart enough to do science, it was the boys I was worried about.
Which makes me wonder… I know that some men have this fear as well: that maybe they are not good enough or smart enough to do science. I wonder who are they worried about– is it those same mythical boys from Bronx Science? Or Russians? Or PhD’s from MIT?
I would love it if everyone could just get over it and do some science.
*For any non-Americans readers: AP stands for "Advanced Placement." These are nominally courses that high school students can take to get college credit, but are in fact practically prerequisites for admission to top US universities.
**I’m using "boys" and "girls" in this story, not "men" and "women", ‘cause that’s what I thought of them as.
I went to an all-girls’ school for high school, too, where my only option was the AP Calculus AB exam, while my brother’s all-boys’ school (now it’s coed) offered the Calculus BC exam. This clear inequity in treatment for the genders–because I was female, I couldn’t get the full year of calculus–really steamed me, because I was the stronger math student than my older brother (who was taking calculus at the same time as I was, by the way) but he got the more intensive math class just because he was male and could enroll at the school that offered that option. Yet another reason why I have no need for Catholicism.
Comment by Kristin — December 20, 2006 @ 6:58 am
Yeah! Good points! Yeah!
Wow, how depressing. I didn’t go to an all girls’ highschool, but it sounded familiar to me. Except perhaps starting earlier? Like, in 5th grade when I didn’t go into Future Problem Solvers because all the other kids were boys? Hmmm….
Comment by skookumchick — December 20, 2006 @ 3:43 pm
Wow, this so describes my own experience as well: all-girls school with limited AP math/science options (and they dropped the Intro to Programming course my senior year for “lack of interest”, which would have *really* been helpful to me going into college), lots of intimidating boys in my college classes (alpha males in training, ugh). Like you, my saving grace was finding and sticking with the other “normal” people, and figuring out that those alpha males were not all they claimed to be.
Comment by Jane — December 20, 2006 @ 4:24 pm
As an undergraduate studying math and physics right now, I completely related to everything you just said. It’s only in the past month or so that I’ve begun to figure out that a lot of the boys are just pretending they know what’s going on, when in reality, they don’t “get it” any more quickly than I do. But yes, I spent my first two years of undergrad wondering if I’d be able to hang with the boys. That doesn’t make sense, really, does it? I earn good grades and have high standardized test scores, and yet the attitude of others was enough to make me question my intelligence and ability to succeed.
Comment by Jessica — December 20, 2006 @ 8:35 pm
We’re intimidating because we catch typos:
“training my frequenting the TA’s office hours.” my=by, perhaps? Real thoughts next…
Comment by Lab Lemming — December 21, 2006 @ 7:00 am
For me, science classes were the only aspect of university that wasn’t intimidating. If sex-based intimidation went on, I didn’t notice it, but I wasn’t real good at notice anything more subtle than a rock hammer back then. Our department was a bit unusual, though- it had the highest female population (62%) of any physical science department in the US, when ratioed to the student body (52% women).
Comment by Lab Lemming — December 21, 2006 @ 7:17 am
Note that the boys weren’t necessarily trying to intimidate me– yet I was intimidated, because I had a preconception that they were ahead of me, and possibly smarter.
Comment by drshellie — December 22, 2006 @ 8:21 am
Lab Lemming, you have a typo in your comment- I think you mean you weren’t “real good at noticing”, even though that’s rather Southern sounding grammar anyway.
Dr.Shellie, this is a great post.
I never thought of it this way because for me it started in grade school, where I was already the only girl in my math group. So I always knew it was me vs. the boys, and felt very strongly throughout that I would never be good enough. There were no other girls for many years. It wasn’t until college when I met one or two female study pals, okay maybe 3 total in 4 years. Grad school was different because for once there were more women, but now some of them were really trying to make it competitive instead of banding together to fight the boys. I still find that odd, but it seems to be the way most scientists are. They’ll help you only if you’re nonthreatening (i.e. work on something different or are at a different point in your career), and even then they usually won’t help you at all.
Comment by MsPhD — December 24, 2006 @ 8:38 pm
I had a similar high school to college transition experience- which isn’t surprising, since we went to the same college! I struggled with my math and science classes my first year, while everyone else seemed to have learned this stuff in high school (I went to an average public high school in the west). The only good thing was that it forced me to learn how to study in my first year, which served me well by my third year, when the classes got hard for most people. In the end, I did well, and starting winning summer fellowships and scholarships. And then the boys (including one I was dating!) told me that they wished they were girls so that they could win fellowships, too….
Comment by Cloud — January 1, 2007 @ 5:23 pm
This thread demonstrates why it is still useful to have all-women’s colleges around. And why most girls at such colleges would have HATED going to an all-girls’ high school. Once I got from my co-ed public HS, where I was one of a couple of girls in the AP-level math and science classes (with the exception of biology), into my physics, chemistry and biology classes at college, where EVERYONE except, half of the time, the professor was female - well, it rocked. I learned I could really get good grades and it was because I had actually assimilated the material. By the time the little fish-big pond syndrome had struck, I was in grad school and gender wasn’t an issue anymore in how I defined myself professionally. I knew I was pretty good, and that there were a lot of men AND women who were smarter than me, but it wouldn’t prevent me from doing a good job anyhow if I chose to go into research. (My most debasing professional moment came from a female advisor with two kids, who so gently called my ambition into question that I was struck with self-doubt for a good month or so. Precisely because I couldn’t pawn it off onto her sex or marital status or whatever - she was a leader in her own generation.)
Comment by Alethea — January 2, 2007 @ 2:35 pm
I think another issue besides the ones raised here, are that there are quite smart people with no self-confidence issues, and less smart people that also do not have self-confidence issues. Genius shmucks and not-so-genius shmucks. I don’t want to talk about these classes. I want to talk about the average decently smart scientist who knows he/she is not a genius but is still productive. The most common feeling I seem to see among these people are that they are somehow kind of faking it all along, and that they will somehow be nailed for it. That is how I feel.
Comment by Pinko Punko — January 3, 2007 @ 6:55 pm
I see young women do this all the time: they assume they’re dumber because the guys *seem* like they have more confidence/ability. Hey, I’ve done it myself. I wonder if it’s related at all to this classic psych study my mother is always quoting, wherein men getting a wrong answer in a fake-game shrug it off, and women tend to blame themselves and express feelings of failure.
Of course, whether it’s nature or nurture is a different question.
Pinko, I sympathize with the faking-it feeling. Me too! Me too!
Comment by Jf — January 4, 2007 @ 7:39 pm
“the average decently smart scientist who knows he/she is not a genius but is still productive”
Yup, that would be me!
Comment by drshellie — January 5, 2007 @ 6:10 am
The comment: “figuring out that those alpha males were not all they claimed to be” hits it on the head. As an instructor, I can spot the guys who hope bluster will get others to quit, or not try hard, but it is hard for students to realize where they stand. Worst are the ones whose self confidence leads them to make insane errors in the lab, or get a female lab partner to think they know what they are doing.
And I agree that atmosphere is everything for any under represented population (female or minority, let alone one who is both). All I can do is foster it, making sure talent is reinforced.
Comment by CCPhysicist — January 7, 2007 @ 1:12 am