The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s annual Math Prize for Girls took place on Saturday, Sept 27. About 270 seventh- through 12th-grade students from the US and Canada participated in math games, the Boston Globe reports.
The prizes were high: tens of thousands of dollars in prize money was awarded.
But that’s not why they came all this way to sweat over some equations for a few hours on a Saturday.
One high school senior from Troy, N.Y., competed for the second time. “It was intense, but also really fun and creative,” the Globe quoted her as saying, adding that “the test requires you to think and approach problems from different angles.”
Girls perceive a stereotype about math, but none may exist
Through elementary and middle school, girls tend to perform better than boys in math classes, but once they get to college, there’s an alarming drop-off in the number of girls pursuing degrees in STEM disciplines, according to Ravi Boppana, the competition’s cofounder.
Research last year, however, strongly suggested that stereotypes about girls’ performance in math certainly aren’t held by boys in their classes or by their teachers. Rather, “by showing also that children’s automatic associations are malleable, these findings are promising in terms of interventions to promote gender equality in math and science because they suggest that girls can be protected from the deleterious impact of math–gender stereotypes,” wrote Silvia Galdi, Mara Cadinu, and Carlo Tomasetto last year in the journal Child Development.
These researchers looked at 240 6-year-old children and found that girls showed a reduction in performance consistent with an awareness of math-gender stereotypes even before there were any actual stereotypes. The stereotype awareness and subsequent fall-off happened despite the non-existence of math-gender stereotypes.
Therefore, it’s likely that interventions, like the Math Prize, can help. By debunking the automatic gender stereotypes girls seem to form about their own expected performance in mathematics—i.e., by allowing them to form more accurate pictures in their heads about their own mathematical abilities—it might be possible to reduce the gap between boys and girls who pursue advanced mathematics.
Can Math Prize do it?
Mr Boppana, co-director of mathematics at Advantage Testing, also serves as the current director of the Math Prize for Girls. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Maryland and a PhD in computer science from MIT. He was a professor of computer science at Rutgers University, where he was the recipient of the “Excellence in Teaching” award. He recently co-authored a textbook on pre-algebra.
This year’s winner was Celine Liang, 16, of Saratoga High School in California, part of the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District, who answered 17 out of 20 questions correctly for the highest score and a prize of $29,300.
“You don’t exactly come here to win,” she was quoted as saying. “A lot of people come here just to solve the problems. That’s what math people do, and it’s been great to meet other girls with the same interests.”
The competition, now in its sixth year, is an effort to challenge gender-based stereotypes and give girls the chance to compete in an all-women environment, helping them make connections with other girls with a similar passion for math.
