Sorry for the lack of clarity — you’re right, the speaker is quite likely unaware of being sexist. What I meant to say was, the speaker is consciously discriminating against women. He’s deliberately acting on a notion of inequality, and he’s fully aware of his own perceptions.

By contrast, much systemic sexism can operate without anyone acknowledging, to themselves or anyone else, that a distinction is even being made. Even on the individual level, claiming “equality has been achieved” can be just as powerfully sexist as “girls suck at math.”

(Which is not, incidentally, to knock the comic. It illustrates what it wants to illustrate really well. I just feel like we should be reminded of the role of our institutions whenever possible.)

As far as math itself goes, I can follow arguments through diffy-q; but I’m not creative with math, so it wasn’t the right field for me.

This and other events made me feel like I wasn’t good enough in math, which was kind of ridiculous since I was usually in the honor classes for the advance math courses and earned A’s until my pre-cal and calculus classes (B and C respectively). When it came to standardized math tests though, I didn’t do so great. I guess what sucked was the feeling of being inept because I wasn’t perfect at everything.

During my junior year my pre-calculus teacher asked how students felt about math and why during an introductory survey, and I wrote about how I disliked math because of the timed multiplication quizzes I had to take in 4th grade. So what did she do? She gave us timed quizzes! They were on something to do with trigonometry, and needless to say, I didn’t pass a single quiz ^_^.

Even though she did nothing to make me feel capable at math, the same pre-cal teacher was the one who inspired my step-sister to become a math teacher, so I guess it balances out.

“Sometimes I feel kind of bad for being one of those girls who really isn’t good at math.”

Don’t worry, I feel the same way about being a FA who hates exercise, gets pretty little of it, and doesn’t exactly always eat healthy stuff.

…Someone should go in and help them.

I’m sometimes ashamed of how bad I am with math because it’s such a cliche. But I’m not dumb enough to think that I’m bad at math because I’m a woman. I’m bad at math because I just am! I’m a “linguistic thinker,” if that even really exists.