“You’re so lucky you don’t take maths or science,” my friend would tell me as we sat down for lunch in the busy sixth-form common room. “Our teacher made another sexist joke today.” I would smile pityingly, wondering what it must be like for her, being one of a handful of girls in a male-dominated classroom. Yet I knew it ran the other way too: my humanities subjects were completely female dominated. The year seemed to have been split by gender. Why had the boys taken the STEM path, and the girls the opposite?

It’s not about ability. Some of the best and brightest science students in our year were girls, and research supports the fact that girls and boys are equally proficient when it comes to STEM. Yet for some reason, the girls felt less confident in pursuing these talents. I too was not exempt from this; I went through school thinking I was terrible at Maths, but looking back, I think it was lack of self-confidence that made me think this. Going back even further, before I moved from an all-girls school to a mixed one, my passion and confidence in my scientific ability was much higher. So why did this drop in confidence happen?

We need to think more about how language can encourage self-limiting beliefs and by default take away real potential choices in later life

Perhaps it is mixed schools that are the problem. Research suggests that, especially for girls, the increased pressure to look good detracts from academic achievement, or that girls may not take traditionally male subjects in fear of threatening boys by outperforming them. I think the key thought here is the concept of male subjects. Why are certain subjects thought to be primarily for boys? From my own experience, I understand the effect this has. Especially as someone new to a mixed school at the beginning of my teenage years, the overconfidence and loudness of some of the boys in my maths and science classes led me to believe that there must be a reason behind it, and that they were somehow more qualified than the girls, which was obviously not true. Years of subtle conditioning had already affected the confidence of every member of the class.

‘This is a human rights issue, and everybody should be involved’: Laura Bates on feminism today

Ultimately, this is down to the inherent subtle bias we perpetuate in our day-to-day lives: the idea that certain subjects and jobs are more suited to certain genders, as we see in this riddle.

A father and son have a car accident and are both badly hurt. They are both taken to separate hospitals. When the boy is taken in for an operation, the surgeon says ‘I cannot do the surgery because this is my son’. How is this possible?

Of course, after a few seconds of thought, the reader will realise the surgeon is the boy’s mother, but for many people, including myself, the surgeon they first picture is male. From an early age, we are taught that doctors and engineers are male, but nurses and teachers are female. So, from childhood, I think women find it more difficult to picture themselves as physicists, engineers or astronauts.

So how do we change this? Changing our social stereotypes and female self-image is at the heart of it. I think we need to do more to encourage girls from a young age to follow their specific talents and have confidence in themselves. We need to think more about how language can encourage self-limiting beliefs and by default take away real potential choices in later life. Though this is a slow process, I believe it is only through addressing a problem like this at the root that we can have a positive impact on girls’ confidence, and change the gender imbalance in A Level maths and science classrooms