Math Anxiety and Gender

Early Studies: 1972–1980

In the early 1970s, long before the issue of mathematics and women became politicized, several researchers, notably Frank Richardson and Richard Suinn, developed and applied a mathematics anxiety rating scale. The purpose of the anxiety scale was simply to find a psychometrically reliable set of measures with a straightforward set of self-administered questions about learner attitudes. The initial intent of the scale was not to compare males and females; however, with the emergence of the issue of girls and mathematics, gender comparison became its primary function.

Meanwhile, John Ernest, a research mathematician at the University of California, Santa Barbara, was identifying what he called an “irrational fear” of mathematics in the female students he taught in a non-majors class. He conducted many interviews and found a prevailing math anxiety linked to low math confidence in his female students. His 151 interviews and analysis revealing the nature of mathematics anxiety were published by the Ford Foundation in a short booklet titled Mathematics and Sex, later reprinted with the same title in The American Mathematics Monthly. Ernest's findings confirmed that mathematics anxiety was both a cause and an effect of poor performance and that anxiety is inversely related to positive attitudes toward mathematics. Although Ernest was a mathematician rather than a mathematics education researcher, his observations were considered a significant effort to unpack the concepts of math avoidance, math anxiety, and gender stereotyping.

At another University of California campus in the mid-1970s, Lucy Sells, a sociologist, was preparing a dissertation titled Sex and Discipline Differences in Doctoral Attrition, which included a crucial finding concerning school mathematics course-taking behavior presented by entering Berkeley freshman. Whereas 57% of the males entered University of California, Berkeley, with 3 or more years of high school mathematics, Sells found only 8% of the entering females equivalently prepared for the calculus sequence. Her data became especially influential among the burgeoning community of women's studies scholars gathering evidence of bias and prejudice against women and girls in many fields. Feminist activists, seeking arenas for policy change, for the first time turned their attention to girls' avoidance and underachievement in mathematics.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth Fennema, a highly trained mathematics educator, was uncovering bias in the research literature pertaining to girls' mathematical ability. Her early articles found flaws in the classic studies of sex differences in mathematics. She was particularly incensed by findings reported in a 1970s Johns Hopkins project on intellectually gifted children. After a few weeks of mathematics enrichment, researchers Julian Stanley and his colleague, Camille Benbow, found consistent gender differences among 11- to 12-year-olds at the high end of performance on challenging exams in mathematics. Benbow and Stanley widely publicized these findings, which they claimed were a result of gender-determined brain differences in mathematical giftedness.

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