If you have maths anxiety, especially if you’re a woman, it could be helpful to recognise how pervasive these stereotypes have been. Moore wrote a book chapter with Mark Ashcraft, published in 2013, in which they provided other examples of harmful stereotypes being perpetuated. For instance, the clothing store Forever 21 made pink magnets that read ‘I’m too pretty to do math!’ and JCPenney sold sweatshirts that read ‘I’m too pretty to do my homework so my brother has to do it for me.’ These stereotypes can fuel maths anxiety and doubtless feed into the fact that maths anxiety tends to be higher in women. In experiments, when women feel the pressure to prove such stereotypes wrong, it can lead them to perform poorly on maths tests.
These kinds of gender stereotypes haven’t gone away. Boaler says it’s still widely believed that ‘people with a maths brain are male’. There are unhelpful racial stereotypes related to maths too, she adds, such as that ‘certain racial groups: white or Asian’ are better at maths.
To counter the harmful influence of stereotypes surrounding maths ability, it’s worth spending some time questioning your assumptions of which groups are supposedly ‘good’ at maths and which aren’t. It might help to expose yourself to examples that challenge these stereotypes, such as by reading about female mathematicians.
One reason why [Sheila] Tobias’s work on maths anxiety made such an impact is that she considered it a feminist issue to help women overcome their maths anxiety. ‘She described for the first time that there is no more a math mind than there is a history mind,’ the US writer and feminist Gloria Steinem said in a 2007 interview about Tobias. ‘It is just that people learn in different ways.’
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