Uh Not with the Math... Why Math is the Reason why Women Struggle with Money
The Ugly Truth…We hate Money because we’re “not good” at Math.
Oh, brother here we go… How many times have you been told that math is a guy thing? Or that you’re not a math person? It’s a microaggression that has turned macro. In this article, we’re going to talk about how our hatred of math has killed our ideas about money. We first talk about the dumb idea of labeling people like poets and quants. Next, we talk about how the culture of Math is macroaggression. My sob (success) story about math. Lastly, we talk about the ridiculous myth that personal finance should be taught in school.
Poets and Quants
We all categorize people into two categories: Poets and Quants. The unspoken bond of who belongs to a tribe plays into our daily life.
The poets are the people that thrive off of wordplay. They typically love literature and problem solving through communication. The poets often go into a liberal arts background loving the idea of communication. The “quants” are math and logical thinking. These are the folks that yearn for statistical knowledge . They love to solve crossword puzzles and they are often the folks on Jeopardy or the national spelling bee. They have “rational” thinking down to a tee. When you are born you fall into a group and when you go to school you’re placed in a category.
He’s more of an artist… She’s more of a girl with no emotions…
Creating learning categories help us make sense of what a person is like. It also makes us believe that some people have the gift in math, but some people don’t.
The “gift of math” creates a detrimental issue in American culture. The most detrimental issue of the “gift” mentality is that makes us think we know who has “the quants” gift ahead of time. Stanford researcher Carol Dweck, who wrote Is Math a Gift? Beliefs That Put Females at Risk, explained the verbal weapon behind gifted math people.
Can anyone say for sure that there isn’t some gift that makes males better at math and science? What we can say is that many females have all the ability they need for successful careers in math-related and scientific fields and that the idea of the 'gift-that-girls-don’t-have' is likely to be a key part of what’s keeping them from pursuing those careers." This is also why women don’t talk that much about money if we aren’t in the quant category, how in the hell do we think that we are going to like money?
Microaggression turns into a MAC
As a culture, we are told that Americans are good at math. This is a cultural problem. I can remember when I was at a Kumon center with one of my future kids and the Kumon manager said that Americans aren’t like the Japanese. For context, she was black. The macroaggression is so in our culture that is seemed in our unconscious. Our cultural narrative has always been that we’re not good at something, even though we are. Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley researches how culturally we create these stereotypes and how it hurts our culture...
“It’s pervasive in our cultural narrative,” he said at the Innovative Learning Conference. “‘I’m not this kind of learner or that kind of learner. I’m good at words, but not math.’... It’s a theory about how the world works (KQED)." Two factors come into play when it comes to cultural discrimination against math: public conformity and private internalization. The best analogy for public conformity is the overstated Kanye West Yeezus Shoes. Let’s a trip down Kanye Memory lane.
Return of the Mack
Do you remember when men started wearing Kanye West hideous Adidas shoes? Year after year Adidas let Mr. West create a shoe that looked like if croc shoes had sex with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. The shoes weren’t even as functional hipster guy New Balance Shoes. Year after year people kept buying them, and some of the shoes were auctioned off for 1,000 dollars. The idea of owning the limited release of Kanye shoes in the hearts and minds of any tennis shoe lover. This is how we use public conformity to sell the dumbest things. It’s also how we talk about money as well.
One person that says oh you know maybe math is more of a male thing. Math is rational and women are irrational, they get periods. We ALL start believing it, just like people think that Kanye’s last 3 albums were good. They were trash. The problem with public conformity is that a person could believe that the idea isn’t true but still play into the social conversation. The problem with a lot these ideas is they create private internalization.
Internalization is one of the deepest forms of conformity because its when we change our personal beliefs and behavior. It plays out in every aspect of growth, be it our lack of equal pay or even in leadership positions. The other day I was talking to one of my closest friends Lizzie Fernandez from Texas. She is one of the smartest, methodical people that I know. Graduated from Welsey University and the University of Texas, and is now going back to school getting her MBA. We’d had been texting back and forth about business school, and one of the questions that she asked me is how did I do it? There are men at school that are better than me at math. Everyone is a “quant” and I am a poet. This is true across all MBA schools. A recent study asked multiple cohorts of a top-ranked MBA program reveal female how well they do in technical subjects and social subjects. The study showed that there was an underperformance occurred in technical subjects (e.g., accounting), but not social subjects (e.g., marketing). I was so furious because this is something is cultural. I ended up sending her a GIF through text that said Hell Nah.
I told her that she has every right to be there and the math, the difference between men and women is that there are not women in math or areas of STEM which is consistently perpetuating the stereotype. I wasn’t always this way. I believed the same as Lizzie.
The Sob Story: Second grade ( Scroll down if you want to see the last myth)
Second grade is was the first grade that I recall experiencing shame at school. I had a teacher by the name of Mrs. Studeman and was a perfectionist. So much that I admired her and hated her at the same time. Everything about her classroom was perfect. From the organized calendars on her bulletin board to her scheduled her playing classical music while we wrote our narrative stories.
She was everything to me and it pained me when I disappointed her. I wanted to do well in class, but I also was a people pleaser so I typically would be a part of stupid crap, like putting a whoopee cushion under someone's chair.. Second grade created a haven for me. I was able to attend a school near my house that was new. I saw my mom a lot because she went to school close to my school, so in many ways, my life felt safe for a short period….
In second grade I had a friend name, Olivia. Olivia was brilliant and cute, she was a perfectionist, just like Mrs. Studeman. One hot California day she and I got in trouble for arguing in class. I remember so vividly. I don’t remember what we were arguing about all I remembered was the reaction that my teacher gave me.
She grabbed both of us by the ear. She to explained that we won’t ever be successful if we don’t act like ladies, and that we won’t ever amount to much. When this happened I didn’t know what to do, because I had already experienced public humiliation before. I didn’t want to experience this again. So I believed her. I believed every word she said.
You won’t be successful
You won’t ever amount to much
You’re not smart
You must fit in
The underlying theme of all these statements pretty much ran my entire life until I was 26. I was not smart. It didn’t matter how many accolades I got I wasn’t smart. That was an underlying theme in my subconscious mind. As a kid who got As in Math my grades started to slip.
You can’t do this. You are stupid. Work harder so you can show how smart you are…
It pains me to say, but this is how I lived and occasionally this is what my inner dialogue tells me.
So, Olivia did not agree with this at all and she told her mom. Olivia’s mom called the principal and wanted to solve this problem. This problem not only exploded but it became a full-on investigation. A teacher pulling ears? Who would do such a thing? The principal pulled me into his office one day. I can remember sitting in the green, plastic chairs. I can remember the way the school smelled. He asked, “ Eugenie, come and take a seat. I wanted to talk to you about an incident.”
I was stuck in a bind do I tell the truth and be a disappointment to Mrs. Studeman? Or do I tell the principal precisely what happened?
What should a 7 year old do?
I lied and said that Olivia lied.
That night I cried in my sleep silent tears. Instead of me standing up for myself, I became one confused little kid. My grades dropped and I took the second grade for the second time. My mother felt as if I wasn’t mature enough to move on.
This was always the underlying theme in my life that I wasn’t “smart” enough. My love for math or problem solving slowly laid a beautiful death. Although there was a glimpse in my life that told me that I was capable of doing well in math. In fourth grade, I was obsessed with owning looking at Hershey, Atari gaming, and Bank of America stocks. In high school, I did exceptionally well in Biology and Geometry but still struggled to see my dream as a person that loved science and stem My dream was deferred until I applied to business school the first time.
Although I had many accolades in my life, I was constantly confronted with teachers that told me that I didn’t have what it takes to be a: teacher, writer, etc. You name it. There was always an underlying theme in my life that I fought for most of my life, which was no matter how many books you read or task you complete, your ambition is limited. My underlying theme not only hurt my ability to learn, but it also hurt my ability to love myself. I like most twenty-five year -olds had what one would call a Quarter Life Crisis, but instead of drowning out my sorrows, I’d figure I’d actually try to on the thing that I struggled with. The work was grueling and I realized that I had a lot of undoing, especially when it came to my mindset and my ability to learn.
When I was in my 20s, I wanted to go to business school. I drank the business school kool aide and wanted to go to Yale or Harvard. Because I was considered to be a “poet” a suggestion for me before I entered school was to take extra math classes to make it seem as if I was ready for business school. I signed up for accounting classes and I took the class while I was teaching. I was also taking GMAT classes at the same time, so one could say that I was doing too much.
While I was teaching, studying for GMAT, learning accounting I stumbled upon Carol Dweck’s book Mindset at my local bookstore. Dweck’s book spoke a lot about how there are two types of mindset- people with a growth mindset or a fixed mindset. Dweck studied human motivation and what makes people of all shapes and sizes what to have a growth mindset- the ability to succeed despite challenges or a fixed mindset which is the ability to give up when challenges are hard.
Dweck’s research demonstrates how the power of our most fundamental beliefs are always challenged and how we deal with them. Whether conscious or subconscious, people motivations Dweck explained that the “affect what we want and whether we succeed in getting it.” Our mindset can propel us and prevent us from fulfilling our potential. Reading mindsets fundamentally changed my view of how I was teaching kids. I have to admit, that I a very skewed view of education before, and I was able to understand why systems and children were dealing with their motivation problems, be it class, race, parents, etc. In the end, it made me push for me to make the vision for leaping appreciating math. I also want to say that I was in therapy for a long time. I had to talk to someone because I had to make sense of a lot of societal issues, reconcile with some and leave the rest behind.
Da Therapy
I worked with my therapist on being challenged with my intelligence and what that meant. There were a few conclusions that were uncovered, but the most important was to admit that I was a child when my thoughts were stifled about my ability to learn. I was able to forgive myself for being a child and I forgave myself as a learner
As women, we have a fixed mindset about money. A lot of the ideas stem from the fact that as women, most of us have never owned wealth. One could argue, well what about the matriarchal societies? Ah, you a smart cookie. After researching countless amounts of many of those societies are not financially wealthy. Most of them are living in indigenous tribes, which is dope, but none of them have laptops or bitcoin in their lives.
The two arguments that are often thrown out is that it’s the education system fault and model minorities have grit and are good at math.
It’s the Education Systems Fault
Time and time again when I tell people that I’m in finance from being a teacher, the conversations of what schools should do or be is annoying. Well, Eugenie don’t you think that it’s because of the unions? If schools just taught us money and personal finance we’d be better off.
There is this crazy notion that teachers must be saviors and that teachers should be the carry out the torch for personal finance. But one never talks about how teachers can’t teach finance because they themselves are struggling with their own money.
Teaching used to be a safe career. Work hard, get a pension, and retire early. I can remember my great aunt retiring at 60 ahead of a majority of folks and living her best life. But this isn’t the case anymore. Most Americans who have 401(k) but teachers have now what are 503 (b) plans which are more lightly regulated. What makes it worse is that public school employees are not protected the same as their private sector counterparts. Many teachers may be losing nearly $10 billion each year in excessive investment fees, according to a recent analysis by Aon, a retirement consultant. When I left one of the schools that I taught at, I had no retirement and there was no conversation throughout the two years. I later found out that there was an optional 503 (b) meeting that teachers could attend. Another problem is that many teachers are offered annuities as a way of retirement.
Teachers are consistently lied to when it comes to their own personal finances. Most folks that go into teaching take out so many loans and the government has said that their loans would be forgiven. But teachers even get got when it comes to getting their loans forgiven.
The U.S. Department of Education released the latest statistics for public service loan forgiveness: As of June 30, 2018, 28,000 student loan borrowers submitted 33,000 applications for public service loan forgiveness. Of that total, approximately 29,000 applications have been processed.Of that total, more than 70% of applications have been denied due to student loan borrowers not meeting the program requirements. For example, borrowers did not have eligible student loans, make 120 qualifying payments or have qualifying employment.
So not only are you not only are you being screwed by loose retirement regulation, but you don’t get your student loans paid back. Oh and on the average salary is 49,000 and you are required to work 12 to 16 hour days.
Lastly about the teacher argument which is entirely culturally is that education is a women job, which is opening up a whole can of worms of women that do not feel as if they are good at math.
In American women are told that they are bad at math. Plain and simple. There is no way of sugar coating it. If we do the math, About 77 percent of teachers are women and in primary schools, nearly 9 in 10 teachers are women. In high schools, less than two-thirds are. So, for the most part, you are dealing with a teacher that is a woman. Countless times, I’ve heard math teachers say that they're not good at math after elementary. This also translates wealth and money.
Here’s what is interesting the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that among a representative sample of 15-year-olds around the world, girls generally outperform boys in science — but not in the United States.” Math and science are strongly correlated. It’s our fixed mindset. Math can be a challenge, yes, but most of it is in our minds. Not being good at math is poppycock. If you finished 8th grade you can manage your money. But it’s hard because we have SO MUCH EMOTION behind the numbers.
