Girls being told they’re ‘too pretty to do math’ is degrading

There is a T-shirt on sale at Myer right now. It is made by an Australian fashion house, Lioness, and across the front in casual script are printed six words: “I’m too pretty to do math” (sic).

I want to be clear about what a shirt like this actually does. This is not a joke. It is an identity statement. A girl doesn’t see it as ironic. She sees it modelled on someone who looks like the girls she compares herself with – maybe even aspires to be – sold in a store her parents take her to. She internalises the message, consciously or not, that this is an identity available to her. Pretty girls don’t do maths. Maybe that’s who I am.

It tells the girl wearing it, and everyone who reads it, that prettiness and mathematics are mutually exclusive. That if you are one, you cannot be the other. That who you are is a reason not to think. That if I want to be pretty, I can’t do maths.

It is, in short, one of the most corrosive stereotypes in education, printed on cotton and currently available at one of Australia’s most trusted department stores.

This is not a new idea. That is precisely what makes it so inexcusable. Only last year, the Advertising Standards Authority in New Zealand ordered the removal of an ad that promoted a pink backpack targeted at young primary aged girls that said: “Can’t do long division”. The watchdog determined that it perpetuated a myth that “girls aren’t good at maths”. In 2014, Libra sanitary products were sanctioned for reinforcing negative stereotypes that women aren’t good at maths. Their ad read: “Absorbs more than you ever did in maths class”. Maybe most notable of all, in 1992, Mattel launched a Barbie doll that said, “Math class is tough”. Mattel was consequently forced to remove these Barbies from the shelf as a result of public outrage.

The world has changed, almost beyond recognition, in the nearly 35 years that have passed since that Barbie appeared in our toy stores. The defining challenges of our age: artificial intelligence, automation, climate change, to name only a few, are mathematical challenges. The girls in Australian classrooms today will inherit those challenges. We cannot afford, literally cannot afford, to tell them that mathematics belongs to someone else.

I work alongside the educators who show up every day trying to undo exactly this kind of damage. They work in classrooms across this country, including with girls in primary school who are already brilliant mathematical thinkers, building the confidence of young people who have absorbed the message that mathematics is not for them. The research on this is