Helping Women Reach Their Potential in Math

This New York Times Article is now member-only, so here's the full text! By Tanya Mohn

THE explanations vary, but the fact remains: Many women are not reaching their full potential in math, and that can hold them back in the job market. Allannah Thomas is working to change that through Helicon, a nonprofit group in New York specializing in math instruction for low-income women.

“You’ll get better jobs, better pay, more interesting work and have a future” by improving math skills, Ms. Thomas recently told a group of two dozen women. She was about to review fractions, mixed numbers and other basics to help them with tests for job training programs. The class was part of a program at Nontraditional Employment for Women, which trains women for skilled jobs in construction and other industries.

Ms. Thomas formed Helicon in 1999 to address a lack of math proficiency among low-income women. As the sole instructor, she has taught more than 5,000 women (and many men, too) about basics of bookkeeping and has helped them prepare for G.E.D. tests. She has instructed prospective retail workers about percentages, for example, and offered other industry-specific math for job seekers who hope to work as bank tellers or in health care.

Her clients include trade unions, job training and placement organizations, social service agencies and hospitals. She also teaches many classes pro bono.

Nationwide, women are underrepresented in many jobs that require strong math skills. Women comprise only 13.5 percent of workers in architecture and engineering occupations, and only 2.5 percent in construction-related occupations, according to 2008 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Beth Casey, professor of applied developmental and educational psychology at Boston College, who studies gender differences in math, says research suggests that boys start to gain a small advantage in math in middle-school years, and that the advantage increases in high school, though by smaller amounts in recent years.

Gender differences are greater in math that depends more on spatial reasoning, such as geometry, measurement and calculus, Dr. Casey said. This may affect job choice, with men more likely than women to enter fields like engineering and carpentry.

The reason that men and women differ in math skills is a matter of debate. It is not a clear-cut issue, as biological and environmental factors interact, Dr. Casey said. “Women are not universally worse than males in math,” she said.

What often holds girls back is self-confidence; it drops sharply in middle school and is considered a reason that so many women don’t choose math-related fields, she said. [Emphasis mine]But “many girls and women have the potential to improve their spatial skills to the point of being very successful" in fields that require those abilities, she said.

Ms. Thomas first observed these issues as a high school math teacher two decades ago. And when she worked in a variety of social service jobs in the 1990s, she came into contact with many women who struggled with math, which prompted her to start Helicon.

While working in social services, she met women who wanted to start or expand businesses; some who could breeze through the verbal part of business plans were stymied by the math sections in market research and fiscal analyses. Other women — nurses’ aides and home health care workers who hoped to become nurses — often had their dreams dashed by an inability to do the math required for training entrance exams. (Test takers might be asked to convert adult doses of medicine to various doses for children, based on their weight, for example.) And she saw women who had difficulty with the math section of the G.E.D. test compared with the other sections. In New York, women’s failure rate on the math section is consistently higher than men’s, according to data from the state Department of Education.

In her current work, she says she has found that while individual abilities vary, almost everyone can improve. She recounted how several years ago, a woman whose math skills were at a fourth-grade level came to one of her classes. After taking an eight-week intensive review of basic math and several other math prep classes, she got a score of 98 percent on the entrance test for Carpenters’ Union, Local 608 — the highest in the class, Ms. Thomas said.

Ms. Thomas’s style of teaching has been called math boot camp because it emphasizes traditional basics: memorization of multiplication tables, for example, and the use of timed quizzes and tests. By mastering fundamentals in rote learning, she said, math becomes second nature and inspires confidence.

One former student, Roselyn Colón, 31, of the Bronx, said: “If her first attempt doesn’t work, she tries other strategies until you learn it.” Another former student, Heather McHale, 36, of Queens, said, “She’s old school. You do it again and again until it sticks.”

Both women took several of Ms. Thomas’s classes last year and in September became apprentices in the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 3, making $11 an hour with yearly raises. After a five-and-a-half-year apprenticeship, they will earn about $47 an hour, they said. .

SOME women who take the classes have strong math skills that may just need polishing. One of Ms. Thomas’s former students, Matilde Santana, 45, of Queens, said, “I was pretty strong in math,” but hadn’t used some of the skills for about 20 years. She worked in the fashion industry for 13 years, but was unemployed for two before taking Ms. Thomas’s classes a few years ago.

She has worked at Consolidated Edison since September 2006 as a general utility worker and was promoted in March. “I strongly believe if I had not taken her course,” the situation would have been completely different, Ms. Santana said.