Before I lose track, a passing thought raised by the Guardian article on “Women and the Maths Problem” about women’s under representation in STEM professions.

I haven’t so far seen anyone mention the network effect, how having friends who share your enthusiasms reinforces them and helps you learn to communicate about them, and how gender might influence finding those friends.

I have, clear as a snapshot, the memory of standing beside my best friend, staring rapt at the luminous white of a cocoon in the early dusk of a rainy Saturday. We were six, both nature enthusiasts, and she was incubating it in her family’s greenhouse.

Her family emigrated, and shortly after, so did mine. After that came one mediocre school with bullies. One highly academic but arts-orientated all-girls school, where my best friend’s passion was Latin and Greek, and we could if nothing else support each other’s enthusiasm for the odd. And finally one high school where a few girls might take physics and chemistry but didn’t buck the social order by being keen. Girls sat at the back, kept quiet, and didn’t stick around after class to talk science. Boys didn’t talk science with girls, an attitude reinforced by the physics teacher who was most invested in the science students and hosted an informal science club [i].

In such a setting, if girls are in the minority, and some girls aren’t really interested in the subject or don’t want to show their interest, and others aren’t congenial, the pickings get pretty thin. Lack of peers to talk science to didn’t kill the passion in me; probably nothing would have; but it got me in the habit of assuming no one shared my interests, and not showing how much I knew or how much I cared, a habit I had to unlearn. I also didn’t get practice at putting my ideas into words, especially speech, which I needed, since to this day my processing can be stickily nonverbal.

[i] I now wonder if he saw himself as (to use John Wyndham’s phrase from The Trouble with Lichen) waging jungle warfare on behalf of his male students against an environment that wasn’t particularly nourishing of bright young men either. As an illustration, this school, which prided itself as one of the most academic in the city, with, as I recall, four or five of the six top scorers in the provincial scholarship exam, had at its prize-giving 20 minutes of academic awards versus 1.5 hours of sports and citizenship prizes. I got one prize, for creative writing. So he wanted them out and off to University, and a girl was a distraction and a threat – a competitor if she were able, a potential marriage shackle, if not. Not much fun being the girl, though.