Addressing Math Anxiety
A study in the Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization found that girls’ school students performed better in mathematics than their co-ed peers, had higher confidence in their mathematical abilities, and were more likely to take ownership of their abilities by attributing them to their own efforts as opposed to talent or good luck.
“I’ve had math anxiety since elementary school,” says Cherish B. ‘23, a recent Miss Hall’s graduate who just began her freshman year at Harvard. “I’ve always had in my mind that I’m bad at math.”
According to a body of academic studies published in recent years, Cherish is far from alone. While studies have found that all students can suffer from feelings of anxiety and tension when solving problems in math, female students consistently report math anxiety at higher rates, leading to poorer performance, which in turn serves to reinforce students’ negative perceptions of their abilities, which can increase their anxiety, and so on—leading to a negative feedback loop that can be difficult for many students to escape.
This phenomenon can also have significant downstream effects, as students with math anxiety tend to perform more poorly in math throughout their academic careers and take fewer STEM classes in college, ultimately deterring them from entering STEM fields, in which the gender gap remains significant. In the United States, females still make up less than one-fourth of the STEM workforce, so addressing math anxiety and its disproportionate effects on female students is paramount if we’re serious about seeing more women enter into careers in STEM.
Interestingly, studies have found that the discrepancies between math anxiety in male and female students has little to do with cognitive ability and more to do with social factors, such as how female students are socialized to see themselves and entrenched cultural narratives around gender and ability.