Chapter 15: What are High Achieving Young Women’s Perceptions of Mathematics Over Time?

This chapter addresses how high-achieving young women perceive the role of mathematics in relation to their education and future career choices. We triangulated a total of 19 interviews collected from nine young women across time. Interviews were conducted during the young women’s middle school, high school, and/or college years. Finally, we discuss the implications of these findings to the Principles and Standards for School Mathematics (National Council for Teachers of Mathematics [NCTM], 2000).

The research presented here is a direct result of a 10-year study following girls, ages 11–15, who attended a mathematics and science summer program. In the first few years of the study, our purpose was to encourage these young women to continue on the advanced mathematics track, meaning that they would be in a position to take calculus no later than their final (senior) year in high school. Many of the young women in our study did continue on to complete calculus while enrolled in high school. However, out of more than 250 young women, only two planned to or chose to major in mathematics as undergraduates. This lack of interest in college-level mathematics does not seem to be an isolated event for the young women in this study. In recent decades, more efforts have been put in place to retain women in the study of higher level mathematics: “while helpful, so far [they] have only delayed the stage when young women tend to leave the track. They used to drop out in high school, as soon as they were given some choice of electives. Now they wait until college” (Burton, 1995, p. 121).