"Allergic to Algebra"

Many clothing stores have been criticized over the past decade for selling sexualized clothing for young girls and teenagers and manufacturing shirts with sexist, insulting messages, such as "allergic to algebra" and "I'm too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me." By marketing these shirts to young women and girls, these clothing lines are sending them the message that they don't need to bother trying to do well academically, because, as one 1991 Barbie doll said, "math class is tough," and there's no point in girls even trying to understand it.

Women are meant to be pretty, after all, and our culture teaches girls that they have to dumb themselves down to be popular with boys. In middle school, I used to hide my test scores, fearing that people would find out that I was smart, as if "smart" was a disease. Our TV shows, books, movies, and music tell women that no one likes nerds -- in fact, one study showed that men felt much worse about themselves when they were told that their partners were smart than when they were told that their partners weren't very smart, while the self-esteem of women was unaffected by this knowledge. I'd feel better about myself if I heard my partner was smart, since that shows that I can attract a better boyfriend/girlfriend, but these men felt that the achievements of their girlfriends undermined their own.

 Less than half of mathematics and physics degrees and less than 20% of engineering and computer science degrees are received by women, and the messages that tell girls that they shouldn't like math because it's too hard for them can't be helping this gap between men and women get smaller.