Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!ucsd!ucbvax!agate!fester@math.berkeley.edu
From: fester@math.berkeley.edu
Newsgroups: comp.society.women
Subject: Countering discrimination your children will face
Message-ID: <12984@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 3 Aug 88 17:48:28 GMT
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>At some point in a child's development, the child will show a natural
>tendency/capability towards a particular area of study.  I believe
>that this natural tendency needs to be encouraged and built upon,
>irrespective of whether it falls under the Sciences, the Humanities or
>the Arts.

Yes, I agree, but again part of my warning has to do with the fact 
that if she shows a natural ability in a field like math (i.e. one
in which her educators are not receptive to seeing, or perhaps 
furthering, her talent) then it WILL BE IGNORED in best case, and
denied in worst.

I hate to bore everyone with my personal experiences again but they
SO well demonstrate my points - as an example, consider the following
two things:

1.  I demonstrated a natural ability for math in junior high, a fact
which was commented on by my teachers and then soundly ignored.

2.  Three years ago, in the final hours of a very long roadtrip from
Boston to Miami, I found out about a conversation my brother had had
with our old chemistry teacher from high school (who was very close to
me, by the way).  He said they had been discussing how our parents
pushed us into sciences, even though *I* was no good at them (which 
wasn't the main point, but cited as one of the problems.)  It is
true that I despise the experimental part of experimental sciences, but
they meant everything that falls under the loosely used term, science,
and in particular they also meant math.  Now, if I was so "not good" 
at math that a teacher and a brother-who-is-a-year-younger could 
verify it even in high school, would I ever have been able to even
get a Bachelor's in it, much less go on to grad school ?  

Clearly there is a perceptual problem, and this is what I must warn
parents about again and again:  if your daughter is good at math,
chances are excellent that nobody will see it, they literally will
not be able to, or that if seeing it, they won't bother to help her
develop it.  This is the early childhood version of the mentoring
problem that affects us women so much in college and grad school.

Experiences of course will vary, but I tend to think that if I ran
into so much sexism in a quite liberal environment, then it can only
be worse in other places around the country.  Sometimes this surprisingly
proves false, however.


Lea Fester
fester@math.berkeley.edu
ucbvax!math!fester