Math Is Hard! (For Girls.)

by Shaker Talonas

So I was doing my thing on Facebook, which usually consists of playing Pot Farm and Market Place, when I was delivered this gem of an advertisement.


["Math Games for Girls—Always Ice Cream: Girls 7-12 collect "ice cream" for practicing multiplication, fractions, exponents, and more. It's fun, safe, and creative. FREE trial!"]

The app can be found here, where visitors are greeted by an impossibly thin teenage girl avatar in a weirdly provocative pose, saying, "Hi, I'm Aki! Join our awesome girls site - cute animals, fun games, and your real friends. Even your parents will like the site because you also learn important stuff."

Let's start with the notion that girls cannot learn math without the proverbial carrot being dangled in front of them. Girls from a very young age are taught, in direct and indirect ways, that they are inherently lacking in math skills (but excel in social and verbal skills) by virtue of their femaleness.

To this day, as an adult woman, I catch myself saying things like "I'm not really good at math." When I know for a fact that I am good at it. I like math; I find myself doing math in my head all the time just for the fun of it. But I'm not supposed to like math, or be good at it—I'm a girl.

This insidious notion is further perpetuated with games like "Always Ice Cream" that suggest girls couldn't possibly be interested in math, or motivated to learn it, unless the lesson is bathed in the color pink and the female pupils bribed with things that girls obviously like. Hence the ice cream.

And Liss pointed out something else, when I emailed her about this application: "But what about the OH NOES OBESITY CRISIS?! Surely we can't be motivating girls with ICE CREAM or they'll GET FAT!!!"

Which reminded me of some of the stereotyping that I dealt with in high school, and the overlapping prejudices against being a fat chick and being a math nerd. I only liked math because I was a fat chick and had nothing better to do, or I was fat because I was a girl who paid too much attention to books and not enough to my appearance, or various other equations of similar antiquated malarkey.

It would be great if we could instead have more apps, programs, games etc. that focus on making math fun for children—ALL children—in a gender-neutral way, without phrases like "Math for girls!" as if we just discovered that girls can also like math.