MATHS READING - WRITER SHIRLEY CONRAN'S MATHS EBOOK FOR GIRLS (I FAILED MATHS TWICE) - this reading is an extract from the article ...

When I arrive to meet Shirley Conran at Bibendum, a west London restaurant (her choice), the author of Lace, a feminist bonkbuster novel that took the world by storm in the 1980s, reaches beneath the table to hand me a parcel. I take it with some trepidation. At least two previous interviewers, I have learned from my research, were presented with white lace shorts. But my parcel, it turns out, contains only compendious details of Maths Action, a campaign launched by Conran that is trying to persuade schoolgirls that maths is essential if a woman is to get by in life.

Though girls are as likely as boys to get at least a grade C in GCSE maths, they are less likely to get As and A*s for maths and only half as likely to take the subject to A-level. This disparity has bothered educationists for more than 40 years. Why does Conran think she can make a difference? 'You have to get them enthused by maths before puberty,' she says. 'And you have to improve maths books. I went to a bookshop and found that maths books were hopeless. Even the fun ones wouldn’t appeal to girls because they’re full of creepy-crawly things like spiders and caterpillars.'

After consulting dozens of maths teachers – 'I’ve paid them hundreds of thousands of pounds,' Conran says grandly – she has produced a four-step maths course, downloadable as free ebooks from Apple iTunes and specifically aimed at girls, called Money Stuff. She argues that girls have to be convinced that maths will give them power and control. 'Maths,' she argues, 'is a feminist issue.' Her pitch is unashamedly materialistic. 'I asked lots of women if they want to be rich,' she tells me. 'None of them said yes; they just wanted enough for a kitchen extension. I was irritated that their ambitions were so low.'

In 1975, in her book 'Superwoman', an inspiration to a generation of young women, Conran wrote: 'Life’s too short to stuff a mushroom.' Now in 'Money Stuff', she says: 'Life’s too short to be short of money.'

She originally intended to write a conventional book but, after her elder son bought her an iPad, she decided ebooks were the ideal format because they allow interactivity and 'an iPad looks like the old school slate'.

​And this is maths as you’ve never seen it before. Everywhere there are chocolates, cats, shoes and items of underwear mingling with the equations. The ebooks have pictures of Beyoncé, Adele, Oprah Winfrey and Kate Moss plus dozens of girls shopping, jumping, climbing, sailing, sunbathing and modelling. 'Models need maths,' the course declares.

The message is that maths is the gateway to a glamorous and active lifestyle. 'When you know your numbers,' says one of the ebooks, 'you will have more money to spend on … music and sport, films and frivolity, fashion and flowers, pretty underwear, cafes and chocolates … fun in the sun holidays!!!' The course follows the GCSE syllabus, but relates it to real life, as Conran sees it.

Calculus and trigonometry, however, are out because, an introduction explains, 'you don’t need them to buy an ice-cream, work in the average business or check your investment portfolio'.

When Conran proposed her maths course for girls and successfully sought support (but not funding) from the Department for Education, many experts on maths education pooh-poohed the idea. 'One of them said: "I suppose it will be printed on pink paper"' she recalls.

What explains girls’ resistance to maths? Conran blames religion and the medical profession, and quotes an anthropological study, commissioned by Maths Action [pdf] and published in September, in support. Written by Samantha Callan, of the Centre for Social Justice, it argues that 'mathematics was seen as a study of the divinely ordained rules governing the universe' and that the taboo against women becoming mathematicians followed naturally from that against their becoming priests.

Nevertheless, during the medieval and Tudor periods, women commonly took an active role in managing and deploying the family’s economic resources. Only with the rise of capitalism did business become separated from the domestic sphere so that, although women often managed the household finances, money-making and ultimate control of resources became the male domain. By Victorian times, the middle classes considered it vulgar to discuss money in the home, and a woman’s ignorance of such matters was regarded as a mark of good breeding. The medical profession argued that too much thought about maths and money could upset a woman’s delicate constitution, disrupting her menstrual cycle and, as Conran pithily puts it, 'shrivelling her womb'... (Wilby, 2015).
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REFERENCE

​Wilby, P. (2015) 'Shirley Conran: "Maths is a feminist issue" ', The Guardian 3 November [Online]. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/nov/03/shirley-conran-maths-feminist-issue (Accessed 4 November 2015).