Show intro: Hi, I’m Vanessa Vakharia aka The Math Guru, and you're listening to Math Therapy - a podcast that helps guests work through their math traumas, one problem at a time. When I was in grade 11, I failed math not once, but twice because I was told that I just wasn't a math person. Thanks to a math intervention in the form of an amazing teacher, I ended up scoring 99% in grade 12 math, and now I run The Math Guru, my very own math tutoring studio in Toronto. I started Math Therapy to take this conversation global and I like to think of it as not just a podcast but a movement. Whether you think you're a math person or not, you're about to find out that math people don't actually exist, but the scars that math class left on many of us definitely do. Oh, and don't worry - no calculators or actual math were involved in the making of this podcast.

Episode intro: Okay so this week is super exciting because we have the amazing Renee Powers on the podcast. She's a feminist speaker, podcaster, and entrepreneur who founded Feminist Book Club in 2018 which was named one of the best book subscription boxes by Oprah Magazine, Shondaland, Glamour, and Forbes - like hi, crazy. Also this is hilarious, she calls herself a PhDropout which I actually love, I’ve never heard that before. But the cool thing is she leans on her academic training in feminist theory to create and cultivate this totally dope monthly subscription box and podcast, which I've been on by the way. She lives, thrives and  topples the patriarchy in Minneapolis, Minnesota and I just love everything about her story. Heads up, this podcast contains a shockingly powerful look at how the patriarchy is partially responsible for the lack of women who feel confident in their math abilities. So you've been warned guys, things are about to get serious. Let's do this.

Vanessa Vakharia: So first of all, welcome to the podcast! 

Renee Powers: Hi! Thanks, I’m excited to talk about math. 

V: So, for everyone to know, because I feel like this is important, the reason I know you is because I was on your podcast...

R: Yes.  

V: Which is so cool and we talked about this podcast and now this is a full circle moment, no math pun intended but I’m really excited to continue that conversation. I will definitely put our previous episode in the show notes because we talked about some fascinating stuff including cults because we’re both obsessed and obviously we’ll talk about that more later. But okay, let’s start with talking about math. Can you give me a brief synopsis of your relationship with math?

R: Oh my math trauma? (Laughing)

V: Yeah, let’s dig deep into your childhood, I hope you’re on a couch right now. 

R: Yeah, I was a good student all through elementary school, grade school. I think I won science awards up to sixth and seventh grade and English awards, I was a great writer. Everything came really easily to me and then once I got to high school, it was the first time I wasn't taking honours math classes. I was in honours classes for everything else, AP classes for English and social studies and sciences, but I distinctly remember my mom saying, “I'm not good at math, you don't have to try so hard at math.”.

V: Ooooh.

R: Math is hard right, so these are the stories I was getting, math is hard. You don't have to try so hard, if it doesn't come easily, you don't have to. It's fine if you don't get all A’s. Those were the kinds of stories and lessons I was hearing. I didn’t take the honours classes in math, I was a level below all my friends and I think that was part of it too, was I didn't have all of my academic family, it was a small school, in my math classes. I ended up not doing well at all. My first year in algebra was fine, I had the hang of it, it was still coming pretty easily. My 2nd year was geometry, and it's something that I know about myself now, I'm not a spatial thinker. The way that we were taught geometry was really hard for me to grasp. 

V:  As a pause, what does it mean when you say you're not a spatial thinker?

R: So I have trouble with maps, envisioning…

V: Oh my god! I’m so sorry I know I’m not supposed to yell into the mic but literally this is such synchronicity that you just brought that up, because I literally just had another guest on and as he left, we were talking about how both him and I are bad at directions and David was like you need to get back on the podcast and talk about this but we couldn’t because he was already leaving, and I was like fuck I need to talk to someone else about this and you literally just brought this up so keep talking, so sorry. So you’re not good with maps, let’s talk about this right now.

R:. Yeah so like shapes and directions. I'm married to an engineer who was a Boy Scout and an Eagle Scout and can navigate anything so I see how some people think and realize, oh, my mind just doesn't produce those kinds of spatial awareness. There's nothing wrong with that, there's nothing wrong with me, it's just I realized in sophomore year geometry, that this is hard for me and it was the first time something had really been hard for me. So I just stopped applying myself (Laughing). 

I remember that teacher taking us through proofs and you know showing your work, how you got from this concept to this answer and my mind works quick and I had trouble showing my work. I can do numbers in my head pretty quickly and when it came to calculating, I don't know the volume of something, that just didn't seem applicable to anything. I didn't know how to visualize that because my mind just didn’t want to visualize that. 

That was just the beginning of the end for my relationship with math, honestly, and It's really sad because once I got the hang of algebra especially, I kind of enjoyed it but I felt like I was off the hook because my mom had told me, “You don't have to be good at it”, my teachers were just like, “Math isn't her thing. She's great at English, she's great at science, she's great at these other things”. But math, I'm just going to sleep through it. I literally slept through my second year of algebra 2 (Laughing) because it was first period.

V: Okay well that makes sense. I want to take a pause for a second, because I'm so fascinated by this narrative of, if it doesn't come easily, it's not worth it. I want to hang onto that for a second because this is something I see so frequently with my students, this idea that we have natural ability. This idea that nature trumps nurture and that we’re born with these sets of skills and that things come naturally and if they don't come naturally they're often not worth pursuing. I honestly think that we are kind of at a point in time in 2020, where it is very hard to elicit effort from anybody, especially the younger generation because we have this expectation from social media, from technology, from the way we see things happen so instantly, that things really actually should come effortlessly otherwise we should move onto whatever does.

R: Yes and I'm so glad you brought social media into it and just having the internet at our fingers, we have the answers literally in our pockets at all times and therefore we don't have to work for a lot of answers.

V: Yes!

R: Therefore putting effort into something can be seen as wasted energy. 

V: That’s a perfect way of putting it I think. It's funny because as you know about me from your podcast, I also was dubbed not a math person. My teachers and parents, well not my parents, that’s totally a lie, my parents were like stop slacking off. But my teachers and friends were like she’s good at other things, she’s really good at art, she’s really good at writing, math’s just not her thing. 

I actually am so fucking glad that eventually my parents pushed me and a math teacher said to me, you can do it, you just need to try harder. The reward I got from putting in effort in an area and seeing the results of that effort, were much more rewarding than the results I got from being naturally good at art, and I’m honestly using naturally with quotations because I believe that natural ability plays a very small role in it. I feel like it's what you just said, which was, when you finally kind of started doing well in algebra, you kind of liked it but then you were like, well who cares? I was taught that if it doesn't come easily it's not worth it so I'm not going to even push it. 

I kind of want to explore that a bit more, how much of it is really natural ability or you don't naturally think spatially? And how much of it is that you just didn't put effort there? You just were like, fuck it I don’t really care.

R: Yeah, I mean in terms of geometry and directions and maps, I recognize now that I learn differently. Things that I see come easily to my partner who is very spatially aware and does really well with directions, we just had to learn how to meet each other in the middle and I think that, you know hindsight is 20/20, that back in high school almost twenty years ago, had my teacher said, “Okay I recognize that you are not grasping these concepts in the way that I'm teaching them, I wonder if I shift my instruction just a tad, if maybe that would be helpful.”. 

So my partner and I, when we talk about directions, instead of him saying, “You go 3 miles down this road, and then you turn East, and it's two and a half miles down that road.”, he'll say, “You go down to the gas station, turn right at the gas station, do you remember where that blue mailbox is? And then you take a left there.”.

V: Oh my god! 

R: I’m a landmark person.

V: This is literally me! 

R: Yes! There's nothing wrong with that, it's just that the way that we visualize space is so much different than the ways that are deemed quote-unquote “normal”.

V: Well I love this because you just said too at the beginning, you were like “I learn differently”, and I really wanted to say differently from who? It’s so funny because David, who’s our producer, this is actually such a funny parallel because he’s also an engineer and we’re in a band together and you can just imagine the hellishness of our road drips because I’m exactly like you. It drives him insane that I try not to say, “I can’t read a map” or “I’m not spatially aware” because I hate putting those labels on myself but the whole argument I keep having with myself is, is it that I can’t read a map and I’m not spatially aware, or is it that I really don’t try? I’m the same as you for sure, I’m more of a landmark person, and I believe that obviously I can read a fucking map, but the truth is, it's so easy for him that if we’re in a car together, I’ll tell him to do it because he can do it so quickly.

I remember, I was on a trip in India once, and I had no choice, this was pre-internet days, I was in India with a paper map in my hand. The only way I was going to get anywhere and literally stay out of danger because I was in fucking India by myself, was to read that map, and I did it. I understood it and I figured it out because I had to. We’re similar in the sense that I don’t naturally gravitate towards geometry, I really don’t like it, spatial things and maps bother me. But I wonder if I actually took a year to learn this, if I’d be able to do it easily.

R: You know what I think part of it is for me? You brought up the India trip, I backpacked Europe by myself when I was in college, pre-internet, I didn’t have a cell phone. I would stop at the train station wherever I ended up and pick up a map of the city. I was so willing because I was by myself, I had nobody's timeline I needed to be on, I was willing to make mistakes.

V: Ooooh, I love this. 

R: I'm embarrassed to make mistakes, when I take a wrong turn now because I feel like somebody's watching me, I feel like I have to know my city.

V: People get annoyed when you do that!

R: Or somebody’s waiting on me, or I’m already running late or any number of reasons. I feel more responsible to get it right the first time than I did when I was just wandering around Vienna trying to figure out where the hell this or that is. (Laughing)

V: Yeah! Okay so that's super interesting, this idea that things that do require effort, you’d be willing to put in the effort if you didn’t feel as though you were responsible for someone else or for impressing someone else or for not letting someone else down, perhaps we’d be more willing to make those mistakes that would allow us to grow in those areas.

R: Right! And I had a free pass. My mom said, “You don’t have to be good at math.” and it was like, okay, if I don't have to be good at math, I can mess up a little bit, I can get an D and a C in these areas and everything will be fine. But that also means I'm not going to apply myself, I'm not going to try, I'm not going to put any effort into it because I'm only responsible for my grade and it's not going to influence anybody else or what anybody thinks of me.

V: If you think about it, you’re a teenager when this is happening, obviously your mom is well meaning but it does you a disservice to be like, if something’s hard, just don’t pursue it. When you're in school and are younger, you haven't been through that much so the stress of having to work through something you absolutely don't know how to do seems like the end of the world, but as an adult once you’ve like been through a thousand breakups and a bunch of shit, finding the surface area of a cylinder does not seem that bad, it’s actually kind of relaxing.

R: It’s actually kind of fun! Yes.

V: It’s kind of fun!

R: So I had to take the GRE, the Graduate something something Exam, to get into grad school, so I went to a master's program, I just took it on a whim and was like I think I want to apply to a master's program. Then I loved my master’s program, decided to go for a PhD but I knew that I needed to raise my GRE scores in order to get into a PhD program that I wanted. What I ended up doing was studying really hard, retaking the GRE, which doesn't penalize you, they just take your highest score. There's a math section and verbal section. I spent all summer studying for this exam and I'm 25 at this point, 24 or 25, I’m over my fear of math so I take this exam, wasn't concerned about the math part because I was going into a social science and I didn’t necessarily need a very strong math score like if I were going into biology or something. But I ended up scoring higher on the math and lower on the verbal section the second time I took it.

V: Why? Just because you studied?

R: Yes, the math side absolutely, because I studied, that went up as it should have. The verbal side went down because I think I wanted it too bad and too much was riding on it and I was so nervous. What I ended up doing was submitting my old scores because it had the higher verbal section which is what counted more for a social science program.

V: That’s so interesting.

R: I learned at that point that I actually kind of liked math and it was kind of fun because it feels like code to me and I love languages and I love music and those things are like secret codes and I want to be a codebreaker. (Laughing)

V: You know what I’m thinking? It’s funny, for me, English has always been the thing… We talked about this on your podcast actually. English has always been the thing that literally makes me panic. When I think about writing anything, I start having heart palpitations. I feel like it’s impossible, I feel like I’m not going to be able to get my thoughts together. I keep writing things and I’m fine - I’ve published a book so I can clearly write things but it doesn’t matter. I keep thinking, and I never want to use this language, but I keep thinking it’s hard for me. I catch myself thinking it’s really hard for me to sit there. What would you say to me if I told you, “I’m just not naturally good at writing.”? What would your response be as an author? As a book person (Laughing).

R: I don't think anybody likes writing (Laughing). I don't even think Stephen King likes writing.

V: Wait what, no way. He has a book about writing.

R: Yeah, and I haven’t read it but I imagine that it says something along the lines of what every writer says, that nobody likes the act of writing, everybody likes having written. There is something of discipline where you just sit your ass down at your computer or typewriter or legal pad, whatever your writing style is…

V: Wait do you think that's true though?

R: Yeah! I do.

V: If you’re an author, that’s literally your life. It’s just writing. Do you think they just hate every moment of it?

R: Well I don't think it's like pulling teeth but I don't think that it's fun. I think it comes easily sometimes when you get into the flow just like anything. I mean I don't think that playing sports is always fun when you get knocked down and skinned knees and broken bones, I don’t think that's always fun but it's part of the job.

V: Okay this is honestly making me feel a lot better because I keep thinking about how I want to write a self help book but I keep wondering if I just hate it because I never make myself sit down and write. If I just got used to writing and got in the flow of writing, perhaps it wouldn’t intimidate me so much when I had to write something.

R: Exactly.

V: So as a feminist speaker and someone who has a podcast literally about feminist books, do you have any thoughts about the perception of women and mathematics, or how it’s presented or how you think about it or how women around you think about that?

R: I think this goes back to the perfectionism issue. I think that women are held to higher standards in every walk of life. We have to work twice as hard to get half the accolades, people of colour four times as hard, people of other marginalized groups 10 times as hard, multiple marginalizations 20 times. So I think that in order to play on the same level as a privileged Western white guy, we have to perform and be perfect and make it look effortless and that's a tenant of this idea of post feminism. That we don’t need feminism anymore because all of feminism’s ideals has been achieved therefore we are above and beyond feminism. 

The way that that works into math is that we have to be on Wall Street, we have to be presidents of banks, we have to be balancing our cheque books and creatively meal planning in order to align with our budget and handling all the household finances and doing it perfectly, flawlessly, effortlessly. If we make a mistake, we’re the first to beat ourselves up.

V: This is actually really interesting.

R: And I think that we’re afraid of those mistakes because we are the first to beat ourselves up, that we hold ourselves to a higher standard because we've internalized this kind of societal level of misogyny that women have to be perfect and when we are not perfect we have failed ourselves and therefore all other women. I want to nail home that this is not right, this is not good. We should not be holding ourselves to these high standards, we should be willing to fail brilliantly even if that means our chequing account goes into the negative once or twice. We forget to pay a bill here and there, I mean I'm the kind of person that when I get a medical bill, which I'm sure you don't have in Canada thanks…

V: (Laughing)

R: I'll have it sit on my desk and be like, I need to pay that, I need to pay that, and then I get the final warning in the mail like, “This is going to go to collections if you don't pay this” and I’m like oh yeah I should probably pay that. I don't have to do it perfectly, I don't have to pay that the minute it shows up in my mail slot. I think that this assumption that I do have to do it all perfectly and have all of my numbers balanced is sexism.

V: Oh my god have you heard of stereotype threat? 

R: Tell me more.

V: I’m so fucking excited that I get to be the one to tell you about this because you're going to feel so validated in 2 seconds. It’s actually going to blow your mind. Stereotype threat is basically a phenomenon and what happens is a group underperforms because of a fear of validating a stereotype about their group. 

When I was doing my master’s thesis, I found a bunch of research about women and math to show that when women were made aware of the stereotype, when it was made salient that people think that women are worse at math than men, when that was made aware, they would underperform. They did a bunch of studies, where they would give two groups of women the same math test. One group would be given a paragraph before their tests and the paragraph would be like, statistics show that women actually underperform males and are scientifically, genetically not as good as men when it comes to math, blah blah blah whatever. Then the other group, the control group, would be given a paragraph about walking your dog in a park or something, and every single time, the women who had been given the paragraph where it was made salient that there was a stereotype about their gender and mathematics, would underperform on that math test. 

What you’re saying is true, this idea that women are so scared of letting the group down and of being a representative to prove that stereotype true, prevents them from actually pursuing mathematical fields and often spooks them into underperforming. You’re right. 

R: This is exactly what I experienced too. I was told I didn’t have to, I didn’t need to because the standards weren't as high for me.

V: Right, and I think this is actually really interesting because I never thought about it that way. I know that there is constantly that stereotype out there. It’s so fucked up, I did this radio interview a couple of months ago and I don't know if you saw this article but an article came out saying that they had done brain scans of children and they had proven that there was no difference in the brains of girls and boys and in this proof somehow, they had demonstrated that genetically, they're both as capable at math. 

R: Oh, absolutely.

V: This is stupid because like obviously we fucking know this but yet articles keep coming out to verify this. Anyway, I'm on this radio interview and the host says to me, so can you believe it, they’ve actually proven that girls and boys are equally capable of math? I'm like, this isn't new research, yes of course. His only response is to say, “Yeah, well I wonder what happens after puberty though.”. 

I was like, this stereotype still holds true. Like you said, this post feminist idea of being like, we’re fine, we don’t need it anymore, is bullshit because these narratives are still out there. Women are aware of these narratives. Again, that stereotype threat is just as prominent now as it was before because those stereotypes are still there even if we want to say that they’ve been minimalized, they keep popping up in other forms, ie in the form of actual scientific research having to come out to say, “Guess what? We’ve discovered that both genders are as capable”. Sorry I shouldn’t say genders. Scientific researchers say that both sexes are as capable. We don’t need people writing articles basically pretending that we haven’t already proven this time and time again.

R: Yes and I think that we're also internalizing that misogyny and women are just as bad at perpetuating these structures as men are. We tell our children, “I wasn't good at math therefore you don't have to be good at math, therefore it’s okay if you get a C or a D.”, those are the stories that I heard even though my mom is a feminist. I think back to my teachers in high school especially, all of my math teachers were men who probably had assumptions about what a girl can do in math class, this was 2000-2004, when I was in high school. Studies have also shown that girls don't raise their hand as much in class and when they do, they aren't called on as much.

V: Hundred percent.

R: If that’s the case, I'm not going to raise my hand and say, “Hey Mr. Dobe, I need help.”, because I'm embarrassed.

V: A hundred percent. Also there are so many studies that I don’t think people even know about this stuff, when I went into Teacher's College, when I went to my first teaching placement, the head of the math department was an old man and he said to me the words, “What is a pretty girl like you doing being a math teacher?”, and it was not 1942. This stuff happens. What you’re saying is completely true, other studies show too that when it comes to rule following, boys are often rewarded for not following rules. If a guy wants to shout out an answer, that’s fine but when a girl does, she’s reprimanded. In a math class, so much of actually feeling confident with math is being able to think outside the box, and being able to think out loud. If a girl is being reprimanded for that, you’re just going to shut up and not say anything.

R: Totally. This is why I went to a women’s college for undergrad (Laughing).

V: Yeah it is really interesting because I think this doesn’t get enough attention. I’m happy you brought up that idea that these post-feminist ideals are like, women in STEM has seen it’s day. I see so many people say that kind of stuff like why are we still talking about this? 

R: It’s still a fucking issue!

V: Yeah! It’s still an issue. It’s a really really big issue and all you have to do is look at University program rates to see that it’s still a very real issue. I have a dear friend who always says this, she says, “We need to stop making the conversation about encouraging women into math and science. We don’t need to encourage them, they are already curious, they already want to.”. Yeah, it’s not about that, it’s about changing these environments so that they’re not so toxic so that they can actually enter them.

R: Right, exactly. And you can't be what you can't see, right?

V: Oh my god that’s my favourite quote of all time! I literally quote it all the time. That is literally my favourite quote.

R: Yes, so when we have girls that are entering these environments, we need women that are guiding them that look like them. People that look like other people. Once we diversify the workforce in STEM fields… There are so many barriers to that in the first place so I don’t know. I don’t have the answers but I do know that math was hard for me and it didn’t have to be.

V: This is going to be a pretty loaded question but I’m actually curious about your thoughts on what the implications of this are. What are the implications of the fact that we are in a place right now where these microaggressions and the misogyny keeps happening around women in math? What are the greater implications to you?

R: Well as an entrepreneur, this is one thing I hear a lot in the women entrepreneur community. I took this small business essentials class through our local small business administration satellite office in Minnesota and it was great, it was all women. We got to the creative part, everybody was fine, we got to the business plan part, everybody is fine, we got to the operations part fine, then we got to the finance part and everybody was like, I need help, we need to slow down, I can't do math. These were the narratives that were coming up in this class and that is a barrier, telling ourselves that, hearing that from so many people - I was one of the youngest in the class so I know that if I heard these stories and narratives growing up, these other women certainly heard them even with a louder megaphone. If that's the story we're telling ourselves and believing about ourselves and our ability to handle numbers, then we are not going to start businesses and if we're not going to start businesses, we’re not going to employ other people that look like us to mentor other people that look like this. Studies have shown that when you put money, if you put capital, into the hands of marginalized groups, it has the potential to lift generations out of poverty. I mean this is kind of a slippery slope logic here but stick with me. I really do think that women who are confident in their financial skills, in their math skills, who are willing to take financial risk because they trust the numbers, will then go on to change the world in terms of eradicating poverty. 

V: Honestly, I just wanted to leave space for a mic drop.

R: (Laughing)

V: That was such a god answer and I think you just articulated that so fucking well, I honestly have goosebumps. I think that was really really well articulated and beautifully said and I don't think that it's faulty logic, I think it makes a lot of sense to think that way and I think that’s a really empowering way to frame it for anyone listening so thank you so much.

R: One thing I’m hugely passionate about is women owned businesses and minority owned businesses. If we support them, it can do so so so much good in this world.

V: It’s amazing. Thank you, thank you, thank you. That was awesome! I’m so glad I asked you that.  I always want to have these conversations with people and the f-word gets such a bad rep that there are few people I can have it with so thank you so much.

R: Always willing to.

V: Always willing to talk about feminism and cults. That’s our thing, you know. We should have our own podcast called Feminism and Cults.

R: It would be a hot mess, I can’t wait to start it.

V: That would be such a fucking hot mess because I feel like cults are so not feminist.

R: No for sure.

V: Actually if there’s one thing they’re not it’s feminists. Ew I never even thought about that. Okay two final questions that I need to ask. Okay here we go. Number one, what would you say to someone who says they are not a math person?

R: You just haven't found the right avenue to enter the math mansion. (Both laughing)

V: Did you just make that up right now?

R: I did! I didn’t know where that sentence was going when I started it but there it is, I like it. You've got the car that you need, you’re driving the car, you're on the right, you know the destination but you just haven't figured out the right avenue to get there yet.

V: I love it, it is a very good visual. Final question, what would you change about the way math is taught in school?

R: I think that we are taught with a really specific curriculum and specific rubric and it leaves no margin for creativity, for other ways of thinking. If somebody had just sat down with me and said, “Hey, I hear that geometry is kind of hard for you and the way that we’re teaching it from this book is not really the way that you need to understand it.”. If you understand the way a child learns, you can cater anything to that learning style and I just feel like math is taught to one learning style and it leaves so many people out. If it was more personalized, I would have loved math.

V: I love it. Okay Renee, thank you so much for being on the podcast and thanks for being my favourite person to talk about feminism, cults, and math with.

R: (Laughing) You’re so welcome, thanks for having me.

V: Ugh, she is just the coolest. Okay guys, lowkey what you don’t know is we legit had to cut out the 20 minutes of this interview that we spent talking about feminism and cults, like we weren't joking, we're both totally obsessed. Stay tuned I guess for our potential new podcast collab called, you guessed it, Feminism and Cults. If you want a little more Renee in your life, and like who doesn’t, you can learn more about feminist book club on Instagram @feministbookclubbox. or you can check her out online at www.feministbookclub.com . I’ll post all of this stuff on our show notes for the episode, which you can find at themathguru.ca/maththerapy. Follow me on all social media @themathguru for more Math Therapy and of course a reminder that this podcast is hosted by me, Vanessa Vakharia, produced by Sabina Wex, and edited by David Kochberg. Our theme song is waves by Goodnight, Sunrise. Guys, if you know someone who needs math therapy or just needs to hear someone ranting and raving aka me, please share this podcast and write a quick review on whatever podcast app you use. Those two things can actually make a huge difference. I’m really determined to change the culture surrounding math and I know you are too so let's all help spread the word. That's all for this week, stay tuned for our next episode which is out next Thursday.