Looking back on our learning process, we will find that we have been told this since school. Although when I was in primary school, I scored far more than Chinese in every math exam, I still prefer Chinese. That doesn't mean anything. After junior high school, I heard more and more girls are not good at math. However, girls with good math scores in the whole class account for the majority, and the first place in our class is a girl, who has been in junior high school for three years.
A recent book, The Language of Parents, mentioned the concept of gender stereotype. It is mentioned in this book that parents' language has a great influence on children's intellectual development, emotional intelligence development, stress resistance and so on. For children of different sexes, parents' language will also have a great influence. Among them, girls are not good at math. This accepted concept is actually influenced by the language of the people around you during the growth of girls.
From this, I thought of the gender linguistics that I came into contact with in the process of studying linguistics. Men and women talk differently. For example, women tend to be formal and conservative, while men have no such obvious tendency. All phenomena in language come from real life. Women tend to speak more formally and conservatively, which is also a manifestation of women's lower status than men in real life.
So when did a person's gender begin to be stereotyped? The beginning time is probably when parents know his gender and start to prepare corresponding daily necessities for him/her, and influence him/her with corresponding language during her growth. For example, when we meet a baby in a pink skirt on the street, we will say to her, "What a beautiful little girl!" " "Then, in the language of countless hints, she began to stereotype her gender.
As "The Language of Parents" said, "One of the greatest ironies is that gender stereotypes seem to be passed from mother to daughter. It reflects the transmission of a sense of insecurity, which is passed down from generation to generation and never ends. Even in the face of actual math scores, mothers have always overestimated their sons' math ability and underestimated their daughters' math ability. Moreover, mothers are more inclined to let their sons participate in math activities, thus affecting their actual participation and interest. In addition, the study found that mothers usually predict that their sons will succeed in math-related careers compared with their daughters. What is even more surprising and sad is that even in the face of actual academic performance, no matter how good the girls' math scores are, mothers will still do the same behavior, and girls will internalize this behavior. When the girls succeed, we and they will intuitively think that this is the result of their "hard study". When girls fail, we and they will think that it is caused by "insufficient ability". In contrast, when boys succeed, everyone thinks it is because they are talented, and when they fail, everyone thinks they are not working hard enough. "