The lack of engagement in @TeachFMaths' female-only Twitter #MathOlympiad2017 — in relative comparison, that is, with the engagement generated by the male-only Olympiad (won by Euler, incidentally) — has spiked my interest, particularly after seeing what I think I can uncontroversially describe as a fairly exasperated tweet from @TeachFMaths pop up in my timeline, and especially since today is the international day of the girl, and yesterday was Ada Lovelace Day, an international day celebrating the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
Yes, of course, @TeachFMaths' (fantastic) math Olympiads are just the kind of innocent, knockabout fun that Dorsey, Glass, Stone, and Williams could almost have made Twitter for (see @richardosman's glorious World Cup of Crisps, for example, or his World Cup of Biscuits), but as it is likely that a large proportion of the audience engaged with the Olympiads are bothered, in some respect, with the business of education, and the fact that this disparity in engagement between the male and female-only Olympiads so patently exists, inadvertently throws up, I think, some pertinent questions that it's worth schools — and particularly we as teachers — ponder a tad. So, if you will amuse me for a moment or two:
As of today, with the female-only Olympiad still in progress, if we take a quick look at the number of votes cast in each — as a proxy for engagement (ignoring, that is, the secondary tweets, re-tweets and the like generated by the competition, where, incidentally, the disparity is even greater) — we see:
The mean number of votes cast per match up in the male-only Olympiad was 315, or 233 if we remove the two outliers that were the epic Newton v Euclid semi-final, and the final. The mean number of votes cast per match up after the first ten rounds of matches for the female-only Olympiad is 61. In other words, the men’s Olympiad attracted around four times the degree of engagement than the women’s Olympiad is currently attracting. The match — or should that be mismatch — that attracted the least number of votes in the male-only Olympiad, still attracted more votes than the match that has thus far attracted the most number of votes in the female-only Olympiad.
My first instinctual reaction to this disparity was one of almost resignation, that this was not, in other words, unsurprising nor, indeed, something to read anything into; to blow out of proportion. Of course, there are an inordinate amount of factors that could and would impact on the relative disparity in the degrees of engagement between the male and female-only math Olympiads — and I won't be going into any eigenvalue-ridden factor analysis about it here. (It is worth pointing out, nonetheless, that @TeachFMaths has more followers now, and thus potential participators for the female-only math Olympiad, than he did when he ran the male-only math Olympiad, and I’m pretty sure we can rule out math Olympiad fatigue, so to speak.) But I do wonder, from the perspective of a Dad of a daughter, a one-time Engineer turned maths teacher and Headteacher, from the perspective of someone who has seen Bourdieuian socio-cultural reproduction at play first hand day in day out when it comes to the life 'choices' students' make, whether this neutrality of sorts — or this out of sorts neutrality perhaps — to put it quite simply, matters, and matters more that is than we give it credence.
When voting in the female-only Olympiad (put yourself in the position of voting if you haven't, yet), are we voting more in terms of what mathematician we have heard of, rather than what we perceive to be the relative merits of their mathematics, as I would contend would be more the case in the male-only Olympiad? Are our female-only votes more a function of the relative celebrity status of the mathematicians, as it were, rather than their achievements, in contrast to our male-only votes? Are our votes simply an act of reinforcement? (Take Ada Lovelace, for example, relatively unknown ten years ago, she now has a day named after her, and trounced the opposition in the group stage of the Olympiad.) What are our choices — to vote or not to vote, rather than who to vote for — a function of?
When it comes to our engagement in a fun, onthefaceofit innocuous social-media competition, it does not — or, moreover, should not — matter whether groundbreaking achievements have been made by men, historically, or not. It is irrelevant to the act of voting, or to the act of choosing to vote or not. To put it another way, if I am being asked to vote between Isaac Newton and Euclid of Alexandria, and then to vote between say Phoebe Sarah Hertha Ayrton and Linda Goldway Keen, the very act of me voting is — or should be — independent of the makeup of the group from which I am choosing. The only thing stopping me from voting for the female-only match up would be the fact that — as I am embarrassed to admit — I know very little of either of Ayrton or Keen, and would need to do some research. Or, perhaps, in choosing not* to vote in the female-only math Olympiad, I am adopting some kind of aesthetic/intellectual distance (cf. Bourdieu, 1984, p34) to distinguish myself from something, to signify something about myself to others. Maybe my 'detachment, disinterestedness, indifference' (in that order) should really be read as 'disinvestment [my emphasis], detachment, indifference, in other words, the refusal to invest oneself and take things seriously' (ibid.). (*I am voting, incidentally.)
And therein lies the issue that perhaps @TeachFMaths' fantastic Olympiads have, in an unintentional, Milgram-esque sense, exposed (whether the issue needed to be or not). From the perspective of the girls that I teach, whether I am ignorant of, or ambivalent to the achievements of female mathematicians in comparison to their male counterparts, irrespective of the relative degrees of their achievements, the outcome is the dangerous same, namely that I run the risk of reproducing and reinforcing the conditions whereby girls are inadvertently denied access to the positive gender role models they may need (see, for example, Dennehy and Dasgupta, 2017; Lockwood, 2006; Allen and Eby, 2004).
This is, of course, not, in any sense, to dilute the joyous sense of inspiration that comes from exposure to and appreciation of the amazing achievements and breakthroughs made by the great male mathematicians of history. We all, boy or girl, need these subject-centred, or intellectual role-models. And I want my sons and daughter, and the sons and daughters whom I teach, to aspire to be mathematicians, or scientists, or engineers, or the whateveritistheywanttobe's of the future — but we must remember that the daughters we teach may need female role-models as well, in contrast to the sons we teach, by virtue of the simple fact that history is relatively uncluttered by them. As a teacher and school leader I of course ensure that students are exposed to — and develop an appreciation for — the great achievements of thinkers throughout history, irrespective of gender. The point that I am labouring to end on is that girls need female role models as well, and that as a teacher it is part of my job to do more than just not deny them this. I need to think, carefully, differently maybe, about my own, individual, inadvertent behaviours, limitations (of knowledge), and perspectives, that may inconspicuously — but burningly — limit or even curb girls' notions of what they can or cannot do.
(Thank you to @TeachFMaths for his #MathOlympiad2017 and for making me think again about my own practice, however inadvertent that may have been!)
Dennehy, T.C. and Dasgupta, N. (2017). 'Female peer mentors early in college increase women’s positive academic experiences and retention in engineering', Procedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 114, No. 23, pp5964-5969. Retrieved from: http://www.pnas.org/content/114/23/5964.full.pdf
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