Kelly Wallace expands on the same, citing renound academic Jo Boaler and her experiences with "damaged" Stanford undergrads and grads - all wounded by the false assumption that math is not within their realm of achievement.
All we can think is, uh-oh. If even the most brilliant of young women - those who attend Stanford - still suffer from a lack of confidence when it comes to math, then we really have a problem.
It's unlikely that we've reached this state of affairs through any direct action. Few moms would actively discourage their daughters from pursuing a field of interest. The likely culprit is implicit discouragement, manifested as the shudder when approached with a math problem, the "ask your dad" retort, or simply the absence of math in daily life. These actions all implicity send the same message to young girls - math is scary, math is not for me, and math is not for you.
