Sheila Tobias Helped Pave the Way for Gender Equality in Math

by David Safier

It gives me a great deal of pleasure to see that we’ve reached an important educational milestone in the U.S. The gap in math performance between males and females has been wiped out. So says the National Science Foundation’s study of boys’ and girls’ scores on standardized math tests, which showed no significant difference between the two groups.

This landmark event is the result of a long struggle to eradicate the girls-can’t-do-math stereotype that kept girls and young women from pursuing their interests in the classroom and their pursuit of math-related careers.

One of the early champions of the struggle has lived right here in Tucson for the past 25 years: Sheila Tobias. I talked with Ms. Tobias about the NSF study. (Note: Sheila is a friend, and it feels odd to refer to her by her last name, but I do it out of respect for her accomplishments.) She told me she was pleased but not surprised by the results. “This is a proof we were right 30 years ago,” she said, “but people didn’t believe us until the tests proved otherwise.”

Thirty years ago, Tobias coined the term “Math Anxiety,” which has become the standard descriptor for people who avoid math, either because they think they’re no good at it, or, in the case of many girls and women, because they think they shouldn’t be good at it even if they are. Little girls learned they were supposed to have trouble with math at an early age, from their parents, often from their teachers, and even from that unimpeachable source, the talking Barbie Doll who told them, “Math is tough.” It was somehow un-ladylike to be good at math, especially if it meant showing up the boys in class.

In 1976, Tobias published an article in Ms. Magazine, “Math Anxiety: Why is a Smart Girl Like You Counting on Your Fingers?” The article, along with her 1978 book, “Overcoming Math Anxiety,” put the topic on the feminist agenda and gave educators a framework they could use to understand a persistent problem many of them didn’t realize existed.

Tobias believes we still need to improve the country’s “math mental health,” so all of us have the willingness and confidence needed to increase our understanding of math when the need arises. She uses herself as an example of someone who knows how to learn an extra bit of math when she needs it. Sometimes her research leads her into a mathematical situation that is beyond her understanding. When that happens, she asks an acquaintance who is fluent in math out to lunch — she makes sure the person know she’s paying — and gets the help she needs to understand the information and move forward with her research.

I asked her, tongue in cheek, if we can hang up a “Mission Accomplished” banner when it comes to math achievement among females. She smiled and said yes, though I had to promise I would explain she wasn’t allying herself with Bush’s infamous proclamation. But she thinks our society hasn’t reached a point where “math literacy” is an expected standard for those of us who have no intention of specializing in the field. An understanding of the principles of math, she says, can allow us to pursue areas that otherwise would be closed to us, and it can be a key to power by opening doors to math-based fields such as economics and engineering.

Tobias is currently working on a book, “Science Teaching as a Profession: Why it Isn’t. How it Could Be,” coauthored by Anne Baffert, a chemistry teacher at Salpointe High School here in Tucson. You can learn more about the project on their website.