There were only two subjects I really hated in elementary school: math and P.E.
Even back then, when those subjects involved blocks and parachutes rather than differentials and timed miles, I despised them. Later, perhaps around the time I moved from a California public elementary school to a private middle school that could afford to teach science more than once or twice a year, I hated science too.
It’s worth noting that I was never bad at math or science. (I was very bad at P.E., but that’s another story.) I got good grades. I generally understood the material. In high school math, I got A’s from geometry to AP Calculus AB, for which I also received the top AP score of a 5. In science, I sank to a B+ when it came to physics, but my marks in biology and chemistry were consistently A’s.
I was no STEM star. Most of my success was due to repetition, regurgitation, and sheer luck. But I was competent. My vocal loathing for the material was not rooted in a struggle to understand it. I knew enough to know what I hated and why.
Math and science just weren’t for me. I have never seen in numbers the beauty I see in words.
Sometimes, I fear this dynamic makes me a bad feminist. I thoroughly support the effort for parity within the ranks of STEM professionals. I want women to succeed where they have never before been welcome.
And when smug dudes with keyboards flock to the debate about why women, in our enlightened twenty-first century, continue to avoid scientific or mathematical careers (“Don’t you know that women just aren’t inclined toward those things? No one’s forcing them to stay out of STEM. They’re choosing to.”), I roll my eyes at their disregard for nuance.
But the feminist response to these hand-waving claims—that while no one’s putting up signs barring women from entering laboratories, there are plenty of little girls learning multiplication who are simultaneously learning that girls just aren’t good at math—also makes me uncomfortable.
I am a woman who chose to stay out of STEM. Who, as a college first year, has abandoned math already and will abandon science after this semester, as early as the requirements of my humanities degree allow.
To the shrugging, self-satisfied man above, I am an example of his point: a woman who just doesn’t like math or science. Whose natural inclination is toward the arts and already-broken glass ceilings.
Of course, while I bemoaned my STEM classes, I was actually fairly good at them—as good or better than plenty of my male classmates. Even though I gravitated toward other subjects, my relative success in science and math ought to dismantle the argument that women are biologically inferior in those areas.
But according to the feminist argument, this is precisely the problem. Girls who are good at STEM subjects are still driven from them. Whether because the media is notorious for portraying female scientists as frumpy, or because girls are told from a young age that they will simply never be as gifted as their male counterparts, or because the pressure to represent their entire gender during every test and experiment is too much, many female students drift away from math and science, even when they possess ample skills to achieve in those disciplines.
And how can I prove that I wasn’t one of them, in my formative years?
Was there a time when I decided I was good, but not good enough—even subconsciously?
But I had a friend in high school who repeatedly insisted I should come over so we could study calculus together, and that it would be a lot of fun. I had another friend who debated about whether to apply to the engineering program at Harvard or the one at Dartmouth. (She’s now at Cornell.)
Those girls, and the many others I knew like them, are the future of STEM—and in turn, the future of women in STEM. And the movement is much better off in their hands than in mine. They burn brightly with a genuine passion for their fields, and the best I could ever summon up was polite apathy.
Regardless of how or why I chose the literary route instead of the scientific one, it’s where I am now. It's where I can do the most good.
Sometimes, I need to stop and remember, as a feminist and a young woman poised at the edge of the real world, that to be feminine, to be traditional, to be less than groundbreaking, is not a flaw. To pursue a career in a field populated by women is not a betrayal of my peers soldiering through male-dominated careers. Nor is it a shortcoming.
We break down sexist barriers by being unapologetically ourselves. If we change who we are because of their standards, whether we’re changing to conform or to defy, we’re already losing.
I am an autonomous person, capable of choosing what is best for me. And I’m choosing to do what I love.