An unbalanced equation: Purdue HDFS graduate student uncovers math education differences across genders

Written By: Rebecca Hoffa, rhoffa@purdue.edu 

Numbers, blocks, puzzles, rulers. Math is all around us every day. However, recent research by Suzanne Varnell, a graduate student in the Purdue University Department of Human Development and Family Science suggests math activities are more prominent in the households of 5-year-old boys than 5-year-old girls.  

As a woman in STEM herself, Varnell has often heard statistics about how fewer women make up the STEM workforce than men. When she was an architecture student during her undergraduate education, professors often mentioned the statistics regarding women who don’t finish their STEM degrees. This led Varnell to research with the goal of uncovering the origins of the gender gap in STEM and their associated stereotypes. 

Suzanne Varnell(Photo provided)

“There’s this leaky pipeline that gets talked about a lot in terms of seeing more and more women falling out of this pipeline into the STEM workforce over time,” Varnell said. “There’s a lot of concern around that because we want to see more equality there and more balance, but there’s not a lot known about exactly when that’s starting and what all is contributing to it.” 

Because studies have shown there are no math performance differences between boys and girls in preschool, Varnell wanted to explore other reasons for the disparities in STEM, such as children’s early experiences with math. 

In her study, “What I Say Is Not What I Do: Gender Differences in the Home Mathematics Environment,” which was published in Developmental Psychology, Varnell found that the activities parents said were important and the activities they put into practice conflicted with each other. While parents expressed that math activities were fitting across genders, there was a stark shift in early childhood where boys began receiving more math engagement than girls at home. 

“What we ended up finding was that across the board, parents showed that they thought these math activities were equally appropriate and important for girls and boys, which was great — that’s what we want to see,” Varnell said. “But what we ended up finding when we looked at how often they were doing things is that around five years old or slightly before that, we saw this split in terms of them doing more math activities with boys than with girls. In earlier ages, it tracked together; they were doing things the same amount. Around that 4-5-year-old age period, there’s this split that occurs where they keep doing more activities with boys, and then they kind of plateau with girls, and they just keep getting the same amount they were getting at four years old.” 

After hearing repeated statistics and disproven claims that girls were just less skilled at math, Varnell was drawn to science and understanding what was happening, which led her to pursue her PhD under the mentorship of David Purpura, professor of human development and family science in the College of Health and Human Sciences and director of the Center for Early Learning. 

“It was something I was always aware of, so then when I started working more on early math development and education, I was really interested in what the origins were in these things that I’d been hearing about for years,” Varnell said. “Where is that starting, where is that occurring and what can we do to help encourage parents to keep doing those activities with girls because they’re just as valuable for them as they are for boys?” 

Varnell presents a poster on her research.(Photo provided)

As her first paper as first author at Purdue, this research making it into one of the top journals in the field was a huge milestone for Varnell, serving as fuel for her continued work in this area.  

“It’s nice to have a journal that is recognizable say, ‘Yes, this is worth publishing — this is a good study,’” Varnell said. “Knowing that people will see it because of that is also really exciting.” 

Purpura noted Varnell’s work in this area is expanding knowledge of how environments and other factors play a role in early learning, which aligns directly with the work being done in the Center for Early Learning. 

“Suzanne is really finding her area of research, and it’s been phenomenal to see that trajectory grow in coming up with really important key ideas, how the different studies she’s been working on fit together into the broader picture of research and how they’ll lead to her longer-term program of research,” Purpura said. 

“When you do work in the broader early learning space, it’s not just about: How does this work to improve learning on this one thing? Understanding the systems and the contexts in which the children learn is really critical, and I think this is a huge piece of that, making sure that we really understand what we’re doing with both boys and girls to help support all children’s effective STEM learning.” 

Varnell ultimately hopes her future research in this area will uncover the causes behind the divergence of attention to math at home for boys and girls and ultimately help improve the problem. 

“I really hope that it encourages parents to emphasize math with girls,” Varnell said. “Math happens throughout so many aspects of life. I think people initially think of it as just numbers and adding, subtraction and all that stuff, but it also involves spatial skills and patterns. There’s a lot of different parts of it that can be really exciting and can be incorporated into all children’s interests. It’s something to keep encouraging being done at home, not just in school.”