Taking it to the next level

Nitya Mani’s (‘15) interest in STEM began at a young age, when her parents read her Richard Dawkins’ books on evolution. Love for math especially was a consistent part of her childhood. Since her years at Joaquin Miller Middle School in San Jose, she has done math research, taken a slew of advanced math and CS courses, and competed in math contests.

As Nitya puts it, she “grew up on the math team.”

Like Anika, Nitya for the past semester has been the only female out of 13 in her advanced topics course in CS, Numerical Methods.

“I was the only girl [on my middle school math team] until Anika came to our school, and so I’m used to associating with guys. I sit with guys at the table,” she said.  “I think that Harker is one of the few places where there are so many girls who do classes in CS. There are fewer [girls], but it’s definitely better than other places.”

According to Head of Academics Jennifer Gargano, enrollment in the Upper School’s science departments such as Biology and Chemistry are relatively equal, and the courses following AP CS are 60 to 70 percent male.

Nationwide, CollegeBoard has noticed a disparity between the genders in AP CS exams and a less severe one in AP Calculus BC exams. In 2013, 18.7 percent of AP CS test-takers and 40.5 percent of AP Calculus BC test-takers were female according to the organization’s annual report.

“Historically there have been a disproportionate number of males taking AP Exams in CS A,” said Amy Wilkins, CollegeBoard’s social justice consultant, in an email interview. “Last year alone nearly 300,000 students with the potential to succeed in an AP course did not take one.”

Compared to other schools where Science Department Chair Anita Chetty has taught, Harker’s classes are more balanced in terms of both numbers and classroom dynamics. Before coming to the Upper School, Chetty taught AP Chemistry and AP Biology at a public school in Calgary, Canada, where class sizes exceeded 30 students.

“Harker, I think, does not represent what may be happening out there. Teachers are very mindful of teaching the individual,” she said. “At the public school, when you have large class sizes on a daily basis, it may be easier for a teacher, from my own perspective, unless you consciously make an effort, to just call on the first person who raises their hand, and it could be a boy over and over and over again, but you might not notice that.”

As a teacher, Chetty has learned to pay attention to these sorts of dynamics. She recalls differences in reactions to girls’ and boys’ classroom participation in her years as a student.

“If boys made a mistake, people laughed it off,” she said. “If you were a female, you felt as though if you made a mistake it was not going to be funny. It was like, ‘You’re dumb.’”

Chetty’s interest in STEM led her to earn a B.S. in biology from the University of Calgary in Canada in 1979 and two degrees in STEM education—a Bachelor of Engineering in education leadership at the University of Lethridge and a Master of Engineering in secondary science at the University of Portland.

As in Chetty’s observations, differences in attitudes towards disappointment have continued to perceptibly divide students along gender lines.

Dr. Puragra GuhaThakurta, an Astronomy and Astrophysics professor at University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) and director of the Science Internship Program (SIP) over the summer, observed different reactions to outright failure from the males and females in his classes.

“Girls often blame themselves for failure whereas boys blame the thing that failed,” he said. “You encounter a difficult math problem and the girls will say ‘I don’t get it, I must not be good enough for math,’ whereas the boys say the teacher teaches badly.”

His comments are rooted in research discussed in Dr. Diana Kastelic’s dissertation for the University of Denver, “Adolescent Girls’ Support for Voice in Education.” In her paper, Dr. Kastelic writes, “When boys fail, blame is placed on external factors, while success is attributable to ability. Surprisingly, girls’ achievement is attributed to luck and hard work, and failure is blamed on lack of ability.”

Nitya refers to these and other subtle barriers against women pursuing STEM as “implicit discouragements.” She mentioned comments she received last summer from a university professor alongside a male classmate who was also interested in investigating research opportunities for pure math.

“[The professor] told the guy about the opportunities, and then he told me that I should look at the pre-med department, because that would be a better place for me,” Nitya said. “There’s a lot of things that people do to implicitly discourage you. Now, it’s not so much [from pursuing] STEM, but to discourage women from pursuing pure STEM fields.”

For women and other minorities entering STEM, microaggressions, such as the one Nitya faced, are often the result of unconscious bias. The term microaggressions has recently received more public attention, with Psychology Today defining it as “the everyday verbal, nonverbal, and environmental slights, snubs, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative messages,” in this case, to females.