Despite plenty of research to the contrary, I still hear people repeat the biggest myth in math education – boys are better at math than girls. It’s sad that a stereotype so thoroughly debunked continues to live on; it’s even sadder that this perception continues to have real, negative impacts on girls and women. It’s one of the reasons they’re more frequently discouraged by parents and others in their lives from pursuing majors and careers in STEM fields. I strongly suspect it also plays a part in girls reporting math anxiety more frequently than boys do. And recent research tells us that for some girls, it even hurts the academic bottom line – in the gradebook, when the unconscious bias of some math teachers leads to lower scores for their female students.

These are just a few of the reasons I put posters up in my classroom celebrating the accomplishments of women in math and science. They’re not just up on my wall during Women’s History Month in March; they’re up all year. But I take extra time during that special month to spotlight their accomplishments, and I have a lot of fun doing it! Now, my students do hear from me about women doing great things in math during other history and heritage months. For example, during Black History Month in February, I usually tell the stories of Katherine Johnson (of Hidden Figures fame), Dr. Gladys West (crucial in the invention of GPS), and Dr. Euphemia Lofton Haynes (the first African American woman in U.S. history to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics). But March gives me the chance to talk about women’s achievements in mathematics much more than any other time of the school year.

I typically start off the month with the amazing, yet tragic story of Hypatia of Alexandria (360 – 415 C.E.). (English speakers often pronounce her name “High-PAY-sha,” although I usually say “High-PAH-tee-ah” since the Greek is pronounced “Hoo-PAH-tee-ah.”) She’s the first woman in recorded human history to be a mathematician and a math teacher; she led a college-type school in Alexandria, Egypt, one of the renowned academic centers of the ancient world. An expert mathematician and astronomer, she taught her all-male cohort of students not only those subjects, but also the value closest to her heart – that regardless of their highly diverse religious backgrounds, they must treat each other with dignity and respect as equals. In a city riven by violence between religious groups, this was counter-cultural and may have made her an easy target. In the midst of a political feud between two powerful men, she was made the scapegoat by violent “Christian” monks, who brutally murdered her. Today, there are a number of organizations promoting women in STEM that are named after her, and her inspiring life story has even found a place in modern popular culture (see image).

I also share in March the story of Augusta Ada Byron, later the Countess of Lovelace by marriage, known most frequently today as Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852). She was born into notoriety, her father being the famous Romantic poet George Gordon Byron, better known as Lord Byron. But because of her father’s many sexual affairs, Ada’s mother took her and left Lord Byron only one month after Ada’s birth. Ada would never see her father again, which was just fine with Ada’s mum, who hired numerous tutors to teach math and science to the child. By her later 20s, her intellectual brilliance led her to write what many people consider the first computer program, even though computers as we know them wouldn’t appear on the scene for more than a hundred years afterward. She struggled with illness for many years and sometimes didn’t receive the proper treatment; even a doctor wrote that her poor health was due to her intellectual exertions, which were allegedly too strenuous for a woman. She died of uterine cancer when she was 36, yet like Hypatia, many organizations for women in STEM today are named for her, as is the computer language Ada.

One of the stories I most love to tell is that of Hedy Lamarr (1914 – 2000), who wasn’t as much a mathematician as Hypatia and Ada Lovelace, but who was a brilliant scientist and inventor. Yet almost no one around her knew it because she was also one of the biggest movie stars in the world, starring alongside Spencer Tracy, Clark Gable, and Jimmy Stewart in blockbuster films of the 1930s and ’40s. Along with that, she was considered one of the most beautiful women alive, with her fashion and hairstyle much-photographed and globally imitated. She was stereotyped as a woman too beautiful to also be intelligent, which, of course, didn’t sit well with her. Her best-known invention was a naval torpedo that couldn’t be jammed by Nazi submarines – quite ironic since she had fled Nazi-dominated Austria years before because she was Jewish. Her invention is a forerunner of Bluetooth technology, and to some degree, a precursor to wireless Internet. She never received a penny for her work, valued in today’s dollars in excess of $30 billion. Her story was told in full in the 2018 documentary Bombshell, and she even had a Google Doodle made in her honor a few years ago.

So far this month, I’ve spotlighted these women, and I plan to introduce my students during the rest of March to the likes of mathematician and computer pioneer Grace Hopper and Florence Nightingale – yes, the Florence Nightingale of nursing fame! She was very effective in using statistical analysis to bring reforms to England.

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media has a slogan that I really agree with: If she can see it, she can be it. If a girl sees a woman achieving excellence in a traditionally male-dominated field, she will feel a greater sense of empowerment. If she can do it, I can do it, too, no matter what anyone else says.

My performance as a teacher is not evaluated, even a little bit, on how well I help my students with passions for math and STEM to find role models that inspire them. But I believe that’s one of my greatest opportunities to impact their lives beyond the mathy stuff. As a teacher, there’s nothing more important that I could ever do.