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@hooser's aside about being a mathematician who's benefited from "get more women into math" initiatives despite not necessarily believing in them, reminded me I wanted to ask:
What can I do to help out my mathy daughter?
Her dad and I are both everything-but-math types (like Scott); she OTOH is so far shaping up to be your stereotypical math-and-music kid. She's very young, maybe she'll stop being mathy or w/e, but if she stays mathy...I just wonder how to help her in the future. (Right now we homeschool.)
From my own experience and studies I recall reading, seems like affinity groups have been the most effective way to help minorities-in-a-field achieve to their potential. IOW, put people who have an interest in the field and are not in the majority-in-the-field in contact with one another. (As opposed to "try to change the field to be more in line with the targeted identity group's average group preferences" or some such.) I did see an online group for mathy girls 5th grade and up, maybe that'll be good for when she's older...
So, any math-and-music types here, what would you have wanted someone to tell your parents?
In my experience, you need to get your daughter to be ok with getting things wrong. It is uncomfortable to be wrong and it seems a lot of girls shy away from it more than boys do, but if you're going to keep going in STEM-y stuff you're going to be wrong. You're going to be confused. You're going to not get it when other people do. She needs to be ok with that and if possible even embrace it.
We celebrated our daughter trying and failing and trying again. And again. Music actually helped with that because she hit the limits of her natural talent at a younger age than she did with math. So we could remind her how she wasn't able to sight read a particular piece perfectly, how it required thoughtful, diligent practice. But then she got it, and yadda yadda. We may have done this a bit too much because she perversely seeks out things she really has to work at and almost neglects areas of natural talent, so maybe keep an eye on that.
Also, we found co-ed STEM activities were likely to be at a higher level than single sex ones (more participants? Less focused on achieving consensus? More competitive?) but our daughter had to be comfortable with failure and trash talk to enjoy them, especially at the middle and high school level. Keep an eye on girl focused activities though because they can be a great introduction or place to get comfortable.
Oh, wow, I can't believe I didn't think about this when talking about math competitions.
Coaching MathCounts, I think this is probably the biggest benefit I see for the kids vs a typical math class. In a class, you're given all the material before you're given the test, and the test problems are all pretty similar, and getting 100% is a reasonable expectation. In MathCounts, well, I just got the results of our chapter-level competition, and among the hundreds of top math students in a big techie city this year there was only a single kid who (barely) broke 90%. The experience of seeing problems you have no idea how to solve, and not panicking, and going on to solve the ones you can along with perhaps figuring out creative ways to solve some of the ones you initially couldn't, is huge.
On the other hand, as a correction to the correction, I should point out that there are some very unrealistic things about math competitions too. The level of speed that's beneficial for even MathCounts sprint rounds is purely a contest thing rather than a simulation of any real-world work, and especially the "you ought to be able to answer the question before most people are done reading it" level of competition among the kids who make it to a big MathCounts countdown round is basically just a fun game show for the audience.
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