Math

I was driving back from a meeting with some colleagues yesterday, when a story came on NPR that said "For anyone who still believes that boys are better at math than girls, a massive new study published today in Science shows there's no difference." Really? People believed that until this week? I honestly thought people stopped believing stuff like that 30 years ago. Anyway, NPR started the story by asking how many solutions there are to the equation x^2 - 15 = 0. Easy, I know (2). But in a car full 4 men and one woman, guess who was the only one who knew the answer? Thank goodness it was an easy question, or I would have lost some of my street cred with them. The story went on to say that girls still aren't well represented in engineering. That's true. Any girl who's been in an upper-level engineering class can attest to that (In almost all of mine, it was me, one other girl, and about 20 boys). Then again, It's great odds if you're a single girl. Frankly, I kind of like being the only young female (or the only female, period) in meetings and such. People remember you and tend to listen to what you have to say, providing you're not shy about it. Which, um, apparently I am not. My car-mates also joked with me about my forceful way of handling part of the meeting. The term "bossy" may have been used. But actually, they were complementary about it. Clearly, some middle-aged men think a bossy girl engineer is pretty cool.