A beautiful myth? The gendering of being/doing ‘good at maths’

Abstract

This paper draws on a research study into why more boys than girls choose to study mathematics. My starting point is that only four of the 43 young participants, and all of them male, self‐identified as ‘good at maths’. By reading these interviews as narratives of self, I explore the ‘identity work’ accomplished within their talk and within the talk of those who produced themselves/are produced as ‘not good at maths’. I argue that central to this are the ways that young people locate themselves in a series of inter‐related gendered binary oppositions including: fast/slow, competitive/collaborative, independent/dependent, active/passive, naturally able/hardworking, real understanding/rote learning and reason/calculation. I then explore the socio‐cultural context that makes such imaginings a central feature of young people’s relationships with mathematics, discussing the role of the gendered discourses of rationality evident in western enlightenment thinking and in popular culture’s stereotypes of mathematical ‘nerds’ and ‘geniuses’.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (Project Number: R42200124333) and the Department of Educational Studies, Goldsmiths College, for funding the research study on which this paper is based, Leone Burton, Dennis Atkinson and Debbie Epstein for their support throughout the study, and three anonymous referees for their thoughtful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Notes

While accepting that the conflation of the terms postmodernism and post‐structuralism is ‘a fact of contemporary … debate’ (Weedon, 1997, p. 180), I, along with other feminist post‐structuralists (see for example, Butler, 1995; Weedon, 1997) find this problematic. Postmodernism is vaguer and broader, being used to signify everything from new styles of architecture to a contemporary postmodern era where globalization has brought about shifts in identity, and ‘hardly a week goes by without a casual and often imprecise synaesthesia of “postmodern” with “progress” and “pleasure”’ (Humm, 1997, p. 145). I prefer the label post‐structuralist because, although far from uniformly used, it has come to refer to a collection of ideas about power, knowledge, truth and identity deriving from the work of Foucault (see for example, 1980) that I find productive and that I make use of/am used by in this paper.

This phrase comes from Mac an Ghaill (1994). His work highlights that this position is associated with middle class masculinity. Walkerdine (1998) also evidences these masculine associations. She details how boys’ lack of effort was seen as signifying greater intelligence than girls’ better but more effortful performances.

In England and Wales compulsory schooling starts with a reception year and then runs from Year 1 (ages 5–6) to Year 11 (ages 15–16).