I almost choked on my Cheerios Wednesday morning when I read about an incomprehensibly sexist tee-shirt that JCPenney had attempted to market to tweener girls. The shirt not-s0-subtly trumpeted the retro stereotype that girls can be smart or they can be pretty. But never both. Its slogan, emblazoned front and center in colorful girly writing, was this: "I'm Too Pretty to Do Homework, So My Brother Has to Do it For Me."
Color me outraged. The design, if you can call it that, featured hearts, flowers and a couple of easy math problems -- one of them left undone.
The good news is that thanks to a fast and furious barrage from the Twitterverse, JCPenney pulled the shirt off the market and, in fact, apologized. (As an aside, JCPenney has another tweener shirt still on the market. This one pimps a girl's best subjects as boys, shopping, music and dancing.)
But the bad news is that they ever came up with any of this backlash-y nonsense in the first place: As if the "too pretty to do homework" shirt itself weren't enough to set girls back a generation or two, take a gander at the ad copy: "Who has time for homework when there's a new Justin Bieber album out? She'll love this tee that's just as cute and sassy as she is."
Cute? Sassy? Justin Beiber?
The mind boggles and the heart sinks. It doesn't take a degree in psychology to recognize that when girls are told that they're no good at something -- or that there's still this false dichotomy between beauty and brains -- it often becomes self-fulfilling prophecy. And so we have to wonder: is this kind of messaging one reason why -- as Slate writer Shankar Vedantam noted a few months back:
Less than one in five professors of science and math at top research universities in the United States is a woman. The gender distribution of engineers at top Silicon Valley companies is similar to the gender distribution of the audience at your average strip club.
Obviously, it's all a bit more complicated than the outdated message that there's beauty or there's brains, and never the twain shall meet. But you have to wonder if these kinds of messages, subtle or otherwise, that we send to little girls often set the stage for deeper obstacles that keep women out of the game when it comes to math and science. Slate's Vedantam went on to cite a study by Amherst psychologists who found that college women did better in math and science -- and felt more comfortable in their abilities -- when their professors were also female.
You don't have to be a science geek to know where this is headed: the subtle discrimination that often impacts our choices. And part of that discrimination -- let's just call it sexism -- may have to do with whether or not we have role modes who look like us and who make us feel that we belong.
An earlier study likewise suggested that women avoid math and science, not because they lack the aptitude, but because they don't feel welcome. Call it identity threat: women may avoid situations -- like math or engineering -- when they feel outnumbered. Researchers Mary Murphy, Claude Steele and James Gross found that when women math, science and engineering undergrads simply watched a video that pitched a fictional conference where men outnumbered women, the women showed the physical signs of threat -- faster heart rates and sweating -- and reported a lower sense of belonging, and less desire to participate in the conference at all. The researchers also found that the women who watched the gender unbalanced video were more vigilant of their surroundings overall.
The point? Sometimes it's the threat, as much as the reality, that does us in. Which could be why we often end up side-stepping opportunities instead of marching right in, loaded for bear. It's kind of a chicken-or-egg scenario: Women who want to succeed -- in math, science or the corporate boardroom -- are more likely to do so if there are other women before them to pave the way. But how do those women get there?
Back to JCPenney and their ill-fated tee-shirt, the first step may be making sure our young girls know that they don't have to chose between beauty and brains -- or Justin Beiber and schoolwork. And that, when it comes to their homework, they can do as well as their brothers any day.
Even when it's math.
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It turns out she came to the school because the kids there, especially the girls, were getting better grades in math and science and taking harder courses than those in traditional schools--and most of them were stunners in leotards and tights. Those classes were all taught with an emphasis on their application to the arts.
Dr. Ride simply pointed out to the girls that physics can be fun and fascinating. She didn't appeal so much to the girls' sense of adventure, which is not usually as well developed as boys', as to their innate curiosity.. What's out there? What's next? She was the perfect apostle of science and fisher of girls.
While Dr. Ride didn't convince my daughter to turn in her ballet shoes for a microscope, she made a hit with her best friend who was planning to major in technical theater. That friend is now one of the few not riffed from NASA after the end of the shuttle program. She will be working on "what's next."
This T-shirt is part of a much bigger problem than sexism, namely that intelligence, knowledge, and work are no longer considered worthwhile. Life is now about enjoyment only, and any virtue that doesn't serve hedonism is a waste.
As for young people not being comfortable when their own sex is vastly outnumbered, research is unnecessary. All you need are some memories from your own youth. The ones to blame are those old enough to be past that. They have to be the ones to greet the younger generations into those rooms. Unfortunately, many women derail themselves when establishing a family. It's a choice. In those years, their careers take a setback. Meanwhile, men in the same life phase work extra to compensate for lost income, and their careers jump ahead. Both seem to find this comfortable, certainly because of culture, possibly also because of biology.
Regardless, don't blame the T-shirt. Blame the grown women who should be in those rooms, and the men who should be at home changing diapers; blame them equally. And blame everyone for furthering a hedonistic culture.
Pretty mixed messages, I'd say. Too bad. I really applaud them for the FIRST involvement. It's a phenomenal program in which both my daughter and son are involved.
My daughter is 14 and is in 10th grade. She is taking college calculus in high school, IB Chemistry, IB Physics, IB American History, IB English, and AP Biology. And her mother is working with her on Ukrainian. She figures she will need to study 6 to 8 hours a day. Next year she is off to Running Start (attending community college) for her pre-engineering program. She plans to do a double major in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering - controls followed by a masters in prosthetic engineering.
She has already figured out that she may want to look for a husband who wouldn't mind being a house husband.
So much for tradition and popular culture values.
I think it's funny, because I saw it and I didn't immediately think it was insulting or offensive. I thought, wow, if I had had a brother, and I could have convinced him to do my homework for me, how clever would I have been? So my two cents is, people see things through their own filters...sometimes it's the filters that need a bit of cleaning up.
I didn't even see the math problems till the author brought them up - I think I must have blocked them out (too many bad memories!)
"The gender distribution of engineers at top Silicon Valley companies is similar to the gender distribution of the audience at your average strip club."
So 4 out of 5 engineers are male, and four out of five people attending a strip club are male. I don't quite get why this statement was necessary?
And if you're not good at math or science - what then, do you just fall back on your looks?
I taught for years and the biggest crime a boy can commit is "doing something like a girl."
P.S. I was a national merit scholarship recipient and am qualified to teach k-12 mathematics, and will never understand why so many kids have math phobias unless it is because their teachers passed them on!
you mean like 'you throw like a girl'? LOL, not sure why you added that!
I have a math phobia because I couldn't do it very well, I was a lot better at history, and English...
This would seem to be totally counterproductive, because it minimizes perceptions of the wearer's intelligence. So even if she's totally hot on the one hand, she's undercutting men's interest in her on the other. Logically, wouldn't a girl want to heighten the opposite sex's perception of both her looks and her intelligence, in order to maximize her attractiveness to us? None of my friends ever bragged to me about bedding a chick with a two digit IQ, I'll tell you that.
Though I am hardly the Sensitive New Age Guy type, I do try to be thoughtful. What am I missing here?
Are young girls interested in the iqs of young boys? I wasn't...it does work both ways, doesn't it?
I was the only child to go to college and I got a degree in psychology. I didn't use it early on. I worked in male-dominated industries..buying and selling cattle, training horses and rodeo photography. In my 50s I started using my degree and ended up working with male felons in a prison.
We can do anything we want! We just need to stay away from articles about teeny-bopper clothing. :-)
As for math & science, perhaps there are other reasons why few women choose to be engineers or research scientists? Math & Science aren't scaring women away from careers in medicine, Nursing is still female-dominated and women have been becoming doctors in large numbers for decades now. Maybe women tend to want a career that is more people-focused rather than being alone in a lab all day?