
‘I believed I didn't have the right kind of brain for science’ - bookofjoe
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jun/08/nell-freudenberger-professors-have-to-figure-out-how-to-behave-with-their-students
======
ifianassa
I too never thought I was smart enough - in my case, for computers. Nothing to
do with my gender. My father bought me my first computer at 10. But, others
said that I can't learn programming if I don't know maths, and I was crap at
maths. So I didn't learn to program.

Not until I went to university, to study computer science, of all things. I
was good at language, so I treated programming as a language problem. I
learned well enough to make a career for myself as a programmer. I guess that
doesn't say much, though, there's many bad programmers out there who make tons
of money.

After university, I did a masters in Data Science. Why I get myself in those
situations, I'll never know, but I studied Data Science. By then I knew how to
program so I tackled all the maths problems as programming problems. When I
didn't get something, I coded it. So I coded a bunch of linear and logistic
regressions, and perceptrons and recurrent neural nets and the like, 'till I
grokked them right.

So now I'm studying for a PhD in machine learning, in one of the best
universities in the world. Not bad for a kid who always got the worse grades
at maths, at school, eh?

So what I learned is this:

a) play to your strengths, not your weaknesses.

b) Dont' believe when people say you haven't got what it takes. They only know
one way to do things. You do you.

Oh and- you know what? Turns out I'm not that bad at maths after all.
Certainly not the discrete maths used in computer science. Not even the
continuous maths used in data science and machine learning. I get by.

~~~
jodrellblank
_Not until I went to university, to study computer science, of all things. I
was good at language, so I treated programming as a language problem._

Just today I was reading this blog post from someone who loved math, went into
programming, and claims that programming isn't math, it's language, and that
the image comes from early programmers being mathematicians and the industry
hasn't moved on from that image yet:

[http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2014/07/15/programming-is-
not-m...](http://www.sarahmei.com/blog/2014/07/15/programming-is-not-math/)

 _People with a math background did fine, of course, but people with a heavy
language background often did better. I saw this curious effect again when I
started working with high schoolers, with a similar curriculum. Bilingual kids
often took to programming more easily than monolingual kids._

(Has that been discussed or investigated?)

~~~
treerock
I remember this being a common belief back in the 90s.

At school I knew a guy who was good at maths, obsessed with computers (as in
often knowing more than the teachers) but was rejected from the computing
course (until his parents complained) because he wasn't doing well in English.

Personally, I believe they were getting confused with English as it was taught
(mainly literary appreciation) and Language/Linguistics (as in the
grammar/semantics and logic) which wasn't actually taught in (my) high school.

------
areoform
It is hard to do the things you love when you aren't wanted. Setting aside the
statistics for a moment, imagine being a teenage girl and overhearing boys
talk about how girls are dumb. Brainless machines of no consequence. That
women can't code or contribute much in fields like math. "They just don't have
the brain for it."

These moments stay with you and they impede you at moments when you need to be
free. They push you away from being the best version of you that you can be.

~~~
xondono
Maybe Spain (of all places) is super-progressive, but I can't recall a single
instance of anyone saying anything similar to "Women can't code" or "Women
can't do math".

In fact, for most of my educational life the "top student of the class" has
been female, even through engineering and maths.

Am I some kind of odd outlier? is the experience on other countries different?
I'm genouinly curious.

~~~
rsynnott
I think this stuff actually is pretty regional/local; participation rates by
women are much better in some non-Anglosphere countries.

Edit: It can also become weirdly specific; participation in computer science
and physics remain quite low here (Ireland), say, but I believe most chemistry
undergrads are now women.

~~~
xondono
I was referring way more the prevalence of those type of comments through
education. I don't think participation rates are very different than other
countries. From my experience (I have a rather weird educational path, so I
have anecdotal data on engineering, math & physics undergraduate courses).

Engineering and physics have similar ratios around 10% to 20%, while maths is
way higher around 50/50 (the rates for the classes I was taking were actually
higher, but that's another story). Chemistry here also is mostly women.

The only hypothesis that fits my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, is that
there's quite a difference in the interests of men and women, and that the
country differences in enrollment are more a symptom of how the curricula are
structured.

For example, Spain does not have CS degrees structured like in the
anglosphere, so depending the subfield you intend to work on, you should go to
engineering instead. Most of the women I met at engineering would have chosen
a CS degree over engineering if there was one. I have seen stark differences
too in physics, were the majority of women there wanted to pursue pure
theoretical physics with pretty much none of them showing interest in applied
physics.

------
TheOperator
From what I could see the teacher discouraging her from going into science
after failing a math test was greatly beneficial as she became a successful
author. Yet she is resentful that she was never included in the scientific
establishment which seemed to be more what she wanted.

Not really the point I was SUPPOSED to get from this article though. I think I
was supposed to be angry at sexism for discouraging her from becoming a
scientist. She reminds me of how I feel about the cooks who discouraged me
from becoming a cook although it was for the best I'm still bitter they said I
shouldn't be one.

------
killjoywashere
> by the time she reached Harvard, hoping to study medicine, she was so far
> behind that “I couldn’t even take a remedial math class”

Wat? How'd she get into Harvard then? Legacy admission?

~~~
Donald
Harvard offers undergraduates remedial classes through their extension school.
In fact, you may be surprised to hear that so many admits have issues with
writing that they offer a non-extension remedial writing class (Expos10.)

These are just undergrads - students come from a variety of educational
backgrounds and are admitted for various reasons, of which legacy is just one
possibility.

~~~
Buge
I think there are 2 things that make math different than writing in this case.

1\. I expect the main reason for needing remedial writing would be English as
a second language people. That is, smart people who got a good education, but
that education wasn't primarily English. That doesn't really apply to math.

2\. I expect standardized tests can more easily test math than writing due to
the nature of solving math problems vs writing. Thus Harvard would be able to
filter out people who are bad at math more easily than people who are bad at
writing. Then again, maybe Harvard doesn't want to filter out people who are
bad at math.

~~~
krsrhe
Math is one of many subjects. Many Harvard students head remedial classes in
music, art, and literature too.

------
Causality1
The article seems kind of unfocused and meandering. It touches on the common
talking point of women being discouraged from STEM, then about the good time
the author had doing research for her fiction novel, and some scenes from the
novel, but it never actually says anything about the plot of said novel.
"There's a professor who may or may not be creepy and a student who may or may
not fall in love with him" is about as far as it goes.

An area of academia as seen by an outsider usually makes for good storytelling
but this article is a mess.

------
okasaki
What a banal way to advertise your book.

~~~
eecc
There, that’s one of those “knock down” the article is about.

There’s this point I heard someone made about internet toxicity: “it used to
be that if you didn’t have anything positive to say you’d just shit up and
move on; if anything to avoid a bitter quarrel in person. On the internet, the
lack of any immediate personal consequence removed this restraint, allowing
the worst thoughts to pour out, and drown whatever good is said.”

Thanks, for being today’s example. Now can you please make the effort next
time?

~~~
treerock
> it used to be that if you didn’t have anything positive to say you’d just
> shut up and move on

While that's an attitude I've learned to follow ("If you'd don't have anything
nice to say, don't say it." as my maw would put it) I'm not sure it's actually
that healthy. It shuts down all possibility of (negative) criticism for fear
of causing offense, or bad feeling.

~~~
eecc
Sorry, I might have worded it too generally; imho a well reasoned criticism
falls under the "positive" side, unlike Evil quips and disparaging remarks.

------
BrandoElFollito
I have a PhD in physics and worked at CERN (which is mentioned in the
article).

The way math and physics was taught at school vs university makes a world of
difference. You leave high school without a basic understanding of science,
yet you had to learn what schroedinger equation was.

Then you do not understand what kWh on you power bill means and how this is
related to your lamp or keetle.

If math and physics was taught with pragmatism and not the idiotic idea that
everyone needs to know everything then we would have more people interested in
science.

Same for coding taught at school. You start with data structures. WTF? I do
not care what a dict is before I can imagine a useful usage case.

I taught my kids to write code with a lot of handwaving first, than with a lot
"you go get what this means later" and now they code. They are not big fans
but it will be peanuts for then to go through coding curriculum at school. All
it took were two evenings and a bit of minecraft.

------
mar77i
The videos I watch online include several game streamers who like to talk
about their STEM careers. One of them in particular keeps emphasizing how to
them, studying their field did not come easy to them, but they had luckily
realized soon enough that working in a lab was what they wanted and loved to
do. So they chewed through the academic career. In short, do not exclusively
measure your chances for success by how well you do in school.

Myself I haven't had a very successful academic career, and even a decade
later I'm still a mediocre programmer struggling to get things done for
perfectionism reasons. But I persevere and don't stop learning things. That
lead to me getting a job in the industry a few years back, now carrying a
comparably big responsibility in my current position.

I very much encourage women to pursue the career they consider the most
thrilling. But I can also see that for women, needing more stability sooner in
life may make it less appealing to chew through an academic career in a field
when they're not sure if they can get good at it.

------
ggm
I related to this story because I also believe I am not well wired for maths,
and have live with 37 years of imposter syndrome as a qualified and always
employed computer scientist. It's a sub branch of mathematics yet I feel
mathematically challenged.

------
burfog
You do have the right kind of brain for science. Even healthy brains are
desired.

[https://braindonorproject.org/](https://braindonorproject.org/)

[https://www.brainsupportnetwork.org/brain-
donation/](https://www.brainsupportnetwork.org/brain-donation/)

[https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-
dementia/research_progress/br...](https://www.alz.org/alzheimers-
dementia/research_progress/brain-donation)

[https://hbtrc.mclean.harvard.edu/donate/](https://hbtrc.mclean.harvard.edu/donate/)

I love how the NIH explains things: _" As an organ donor, you agree to give
your organs to other people to help keep them alive. As a brain donor, your
brain will be used for research purposes only—it will not be given to another
person."_ That's good to know.

~~~
ryacko
And there are so many stories about science donations disrespecting the donors
intentions.

Reuters did a series on it:

[https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-
bodi...](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodies-
brokers/)

[https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-
body...](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-bodybrokers-
industry/)

~~~
stallmanite
Just when I think maybe I’m too cynical in thinking that non-corrupt charities
represent a statistical rounding-error, something like this pops up to
reconfirm my intuition. Thanks for the link

------
eecc
I need to finish the article but let me leave a “reaction post” here just for
starters... that Strumia guy - the misogynist Italian physicist - is a tool.
The prototypical socially disabled person that compensates for their
ineptitude by digging themselves into a trench of books. I’m male, but having
studied engineering I had the displeasure to bump into examples a couple
times; and it left marks.

~~~
0815test
That Strumia guy was mostly "compensating" for his sour grapes, actually. He
actually brought up an internal controversy about tenure promotion or
something similar, that _he_ was involved in, as an example of gender bias for
his CERN "talk", and people fell for it. Master troll.

