Women are Worse in Math

Yay!!! I finally feel normal now that I read this.  I sucks at maths big time.  I was in an all-Malay schools for the first six years.  It has been a stereotype (or is it true) that Malays generally are not as good as calculative Chinese in maths.  So, when I was in secondary school, I ended up with this bunch of Chinese educated Chinese  who can rattled off their sain-cosain-tangent (until now I still dunno what the hell is that)  formula and those mind bloggling Additional Maths formula.  Meanwhile, I couldn’t even remember how to calculate the square feet of surfaces!  Call it stereotyping killed my braincells.

Then, recently I was at this little stall to buy some stuffs.  The old man was manning the stall on his son’s behalf and since he is not a the stall owner, he couldn’t calculate well.  So, he was expecting me to count how much is RM1.80 plus RM2.40 plus RM5.70.  I ended up in cold sweats because, heck!  my brain ain’t wire to do stuffs like that.  Where are the calculators, apek oi!   Luckily, another man was also waiting to pay and told the old man how much is my stuffs.  Phew…But it was sooooo embarassing, man.

Now that I read this, I know that I had been unfairly stereotyped (by being in a Malay school and a girl) and hence, I have excuses to be dumb in maths.

Even suggesting to women that men may be naturally better at math can cause those women to underperform, according to a new study published last week in Science.

In two separate trials, researchers at the University of British Columbia gave more than 220 women a three-part test to study stereotypes and math performance. The test was divided into two math sections, separated by one of four essays about gender and math performance which the women were told was a reading-comprehension test. Women who received essays reminding them that females tend to score worse on math tests than males had markedly lower scores on the second math section than women who read essays that argued there was no math-related gender difference.

Even suggesting that a group of people may be naturally bad at something can reinforce stereotypes and lead to underperformance. (read the full story on Time)