Encourage girls to love math: 5 key strategies

1. Awareness of teachers of false beliefs

This reflection will lead them to change their teaching of mathematics. “A teacher must self -analyze himself all the time, advises Agnes Gateau, project manager. For example, taking care to give the words to girls as well as to boys. National education also recommends that they repeat to children that girls and boys have the same math capacities, and that work is the key to success.

2. Teach otherwise

There are many playful methods that reduce the anxiety of the youngest to math. The one called heuristic, for example, offers the little ones to play mathematical games of their choice, such as the “banker game” or “the vegetable war”. It also leaves a large place to handle objects. Students who follow this method often get better grades. And they do it at their own pace. “The hearts of math is reasoning, not the speed of the result”, judges Agnès Gateau.

3. Help parents change their eyes

They have a role to play in their speech, but also in the toys they buy. Neuroscientist Jessica Cantlon observed that the brain of teenage girls and boys had subtle differences when it was a question of math, unlike the youngest.

Its hypothesis is that these older boys have developed greater faculties because they have more toys improving their spatial understanding, such as construction games.

4. Establish math days between girls

Each year, the Women and Mathematics association organizes the days “girls, math and computer science: a light equation”, intended for college and high school students.

The fact that these days were reserved for girls had, for a time, created eddies. “I was not favorable to it at the start,” says the honorary president, Véronique Slovacek-Chauveau. But she quickly found that girls’ returns were rave.

Aurélie, the disappointed mathematics student, had kept a memorable memory of one of these days when she was in the first class. “We had spent a weekend doing math between girls, it was great. It was not at all the same dynamic as with boys. There was less competition, we did not feel judged. And no one cut us off. »»

5. Present female models

Each human being needs models. The Women and Mathematics association therefore invites scientific women during its awareness days, at the Henri-Poincaré Institute in Paris.

January 17, The pilgrim was able to participate in one of them. Teenagers of third and second classes have discussed with an astrophysicist, an engineer from Chanel or a data analyst who worked for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.