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Comment by 1cvmask | Hacker News Reader

These puff pieces by journalists always feel the need to include some adversity story - whether real or contrive or perceived does not matter. It sells more copy.

Contrast that with the recently deceased female Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the Fields medal, and her accomplishments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maryam_Mirzakhani

Speaking of building bridges in Mathematics Paul Erdos came to mind. There is a great book on him called "The Man Who Only Loved Numbers."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Loved_Only_Numbers

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s

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To be fair to the author, this lady is a Romanian and Romanian social norms are quite far from British ones. I don't really doubt that she heard some unflattering remarks from her peers, though no one probably actively hindered her from studying maths.

I studied maths in Czechia in the late 1990s and girls studying maths were still considered somewhat abnormal, especially by people who weren't able to do the same :(

It’s weird to me to hear this. I was schooled in Romania as well and have the opposite impression. I am a little younger to be fair, I was in elementary school as opposed to high school in 2001, but, my impression ( biased since I am a man ) was that everyone, men and women, was encouraged towards STEM. Mainly because it was and still is seen as a path out of poverty. In fact, very often the teachers would praise girls for their conscientiousness. I heard this a million times as a student. Boys rush to solve the problem, blunder, end up making a big X on the paper, backtrack and make mistakes because they don’t pay as much attention while girls are more attentive and are more careful in their solutions. This is the stereotype I got left with from school. Plus, a lot of teachers of STEM. Even in Uni ( also in Romania for me ) I had a lot of important subjects taught by women.

I work hard with my daughters on math. They are highly intelligent and have a talent for it.

Nothing but lip and complaints on how useless it is. I know the moment they get a free choice, they will never touch it again.

My only hope is to find a group of girls that are into math for them to hang out with. But more then likely will take the easy road of going off there looks to get what they want in life. One already has.

like anything in life, to be good at something you need to have talent and internal motivation to pursue something, you can't make someone enjoy something that they don't really enjoy regardless of how talented they are.

Nonsense. They are kids. They will lean many useful skills. When they are adults they can do whatever they want. My responsibility is to give them opportunities for success. I pushed hard on one to finish college. She was super pissed at me the entire time. She deeply regrets dropping out now.

It’s almost like women are autonomous individuals capable of making decisions about their own lives, and pursuing their own interests. Very odd. </s>

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