The April 5, 2004 issue of NEWSWEEK has an article by a woman engineer who describes how she chose engineering and became "the only female engineer at (her) company." Since this article is only going to be available for another few days, I'll quote from it here. The author recounts how she had no idea of engineering as a high school student until she went to a "six-week summer program designed to interest girls in engineering." She did well and got her degree, and plenty of job offers, in engineering. Her story is so inspiring to me that I will quote it at length:

"I can't help shuddering when I hear about studies that show that women are at a disadvantage when it comes to math. They imply that I am somehow abnormal. I'm not, but I do know that if I hadn't stumbled into that summer program, I wouldn't be an engineer.
When I was growing up I was told, as many students are, to do what I am best at. But I didn't know what that was. Most people think that when you are good at something, it comes easily to you. But this is what I discovered: just because a subject is difficult to learn, it does not mean you are not good at it. You just have to grit your teeth and work harder to get good at it…"

She goes on to tell how a sympathetic teacher allowed her to re-study for and re-take math tests she had failed, and how she eventually succeeded, with determination, in college. She continues:

"But the guys in my classes had to work just as hard, and I knew that I couldn't afford to lose confidence in myself… So I reminded myself that those studies, the ones that say that math comes more naturally to men, are based on a faulty premise: that you can judge a person's abilities separate from the cultural cues that she has received since she was an infant…
Here's a secret: math and science don't come easily to most people. No one was ever born knowing calculus. A woman can learn anything a man can, but first she needs to know that she can do it, and that takes a leap of faith…"

I'm not so sure about that last paragraph though. The biographies of male physicists that I've read (including Wheeler, Feynman, Freeman Dyson, Murray Gell-Mann, and the mouthy Magueijo among others) almost always state that the young budding scientist taught himself calculus and differential equations at a very young age, (some by eleven, others at sixteen) just by himself, in a matter of just a few months! It is as if these guys WERE born knowing calculus, and only needed a little review to pick it up again.

When I ask why I can't do this and learn higher mathematics at such dazzling speed and with such ease, the usual counter-question is, "Who do you think you are? You think you're as smart and gifted as (name that physicist)? Don't compare yourself to geniuses! Get real!"

I can't help comparing my situation, though, to the woman engineer who wrote the Newsweek article. She's young and mentally strong. She isn't fifty years old. I had no idea, in high school, that there were summer programs designed to interest girls in engineering, and if I had known, I wouldn't have signed up — when I was in high school, I wanted to be a writer and artist. I have no idea what has come over me in my baggy middle years. It's not like I'm going to go back to school or have a career in any form of engineering or science.

I am still struggling over the same trigonometric identity, multi-angle and double-angle problems that I have been working with for the last three months. I can solve some of them, but not all of them. I don't know how much of this I have to do before I can go on. Do I have to successfully solve every one of them? These interlocking fences of trigonometry stand in the way of my proceeding in my math studies. I may have a great deal of determination, perhaps to the point of obsession, but I have limited energy. And yet I know I will grit my teeth and be back at it tomorrow.

Posted at 1:45 am | link