It’s a typical day over winter break for junior electrical engineering major Jessie Berry. She arises early in the morning to get ready for her internship at Endicott Interconnective Technologies, where she is the only girl on staff. After a long day scanning circuit boards and testing optical inspection tools, she goes home to help her dad and his all-male team do home repair. Typically, she helps in all areas of the job, including wiring, drilling holes, installing radon systems, and renovating bathrooms. Then, if she still has enough energy, she might check her Facebook account to see if any of her male classmates messaged her. Since even her fullest lectures feature only a few sporadic girls, she rarely makes girlfriends in her department.

Berry is used to her mathematical mind setting her apart from other girls. Although studies continually prove that the male gender has no inherent advantage in math and science, there is still a public perception that men are innately better in these fields than their female counterparts. Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard University, echoed this sentiment when he gave a speech in 2005 arguing that women were naturally deficient in science and math, and that girls don’t receive the highest grades on standardized tests. Summers later apologized, as biological factors have been proven to have no impact on gender strengths. Instead, researchers point to a variety of causes holding these girls back, ranging from psychological mindsets to educational biases to societal pressures.

The natural ability of girls to prevail in math and science has been recognized for years. In 1989, the National Research Council of the United States found “almost no differences in performance among male and female students who have taken equal advantage of similar opportunities to study mathematics.” A 1994 National Science Foundation study found that there was consistently no gap in mathematic proficiency scores between boys and girls at ages 9 and 13; the gap in science scores between boys and girls at age 9 was minimal. Boys do consistently rate higher on the math section of the SAT, but critics consider the test flawed in format and structure, pointing to girls’ success on European tests.

Consistent with these findings, Berry found that she succeeded in math and sciences as far back as elementary school. She insists that her engineering mind manifested itself at a young age, and she didn’t find herself enjoying stereotypical female subjects.

“As a kid, I always took things apart to see how they worked and helped my dad work on the car. I was never an English or language person. I got good enough grades, but I was never a fan of writing papers or learning nouns of Spanish,” she said.

Perhaps the reason that girls gravitate towards more conceptual and abstract topics goes back to educational bias in the classroom. Research concerning institutional biases in America’s schools found that boys receive preferential treatment in the classroom. The award winning teaching journal Childhood Education reported in 2005 that gender inequity still exists in the classroom. Teachers were found to give boys more attention than girls, and what the girls did receive was usually negative. This differential treatment tended to lower girls’ self-esteem, confidence, and ambition.

American Studies professor Ruth Meyerowitz, who currently teaches History of Working Women, agrees that teachers can hinder their female students’ academic growth, even if they’re unaware of it. “I think girls are socialized and tracked away from math and sciences. It’s often subconscious by the teachers. Kids are very impressionistic – they respond to comments that are overheard. It’s surprising some of the mentalities, such as ‘Girls need to behave like ladies’ and ‘Don’t trouble your pretty little head about this.’ ”

Meyerowitz, who has a daughter in the first grade, says she is troubled by some of the instances of gender bias that she has witnessed. “There’s been very little attention given to training teachers to be more gender equitable,” she said.

Additionally, psychologists at Stanford discuss what they call a “stereotype threat.” They note that there’s a direct effect between negative labels and performance on tests. When women or other minority groups are told that they’re not going to score well on tests, studies show they “choke” and don’t perform to their ability.

“I hate science. I don’t have the right kind of mind to do science or math related crap,” said freshman psychology major Jane Adams. “I’ve always done bad in them, I lean more towards English because I take more of an interest in reading and writing,”

Unlike Berry, many girls just do not have the desire to pursue careers in math and science, even if they are capable of such jobs. A 1997 study from Stanford looked at undergraduates that dropped out of engineering programs. They found that the female students who switched majors had similar grade point averages as their male counterparts, but listed their primary reason for dropping out as losing interest.

Social pressures come into play as well. The media constantly portrays women as working in either less demanding careers, such as teaching, or as domestic homemakers. Women are not publicly perceived to be engineers, mathematicians, and scientists, and there’s a certain social stigma that comes with studying those fields.

“What I don’t understand is why women should be scientists and engineers when the most complicated thing they really need to learn is how to program the VCR for when I get home. How do girls get accepted into those majors, are they just the ones that weren’t pretty enough for normal majors,” said freshman psychology major Anthony Falcone.

That’s not to say that women haven’t come a long way. In December 2006, The New York Times reported that half of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s undergraduate science majors are female, a third of engineering majors belonged to women, and half of the nation’s medical students were women.

Sofia Gameiro, a fourth year pharmaceutical sciences PhD student, insists that besides a few rare occasions of older, more traditional professors talking condescendingly to her, she has received constant encouragement and support since developing an interest in science at age 15.

“I don’t think I’ve ever felt discriminated against for being a woman. If anything, it’s been the opposite. Though my degree is in pharmacy, my work is in immunology because that’s the nature of what I do. In my experience, I’ve worked with more women than men, so I don’t feel as if women are underrepresented. It’s very balanced,” said Gamiero.

However, there’s one subtle roadblock that women are bound to face more often than men. Companies are reluctant to hire women that plan on having children, giving the illusion that women are forced to choose between their careers and future children. Gamiero says that she’s been asked if she plans on having kids in the future during interviews, and hopes it’s not a hindering factor in hiring her.

“Often, when women run for postdocs, they will be asked if they want to have kids. For women, bearing a children becomes a factor in getting hired. I’ve been asked it, and I hope it didn’t hurt my chances,” said Gameiro.

Although some institutional factors and traditional mindsets are hard to break, bright and hardworking students like Berry and Gamiero are helping to pave the way for more women to come into math and science fields. It’s far from equal, but more women are entering these fields now than ever, and girls who want to succeed in science and math can very well do so with enough effort.

“Even though everybody is always surprised at first when they hear my goals, a lot of people encourage me and think it’s cool that I’m into this kind of stuff. I hear ‘Wow, that’s cool’ more than I face discrimination. The worst pressure I get is from guys in my class trying to get me to bring more girls into the major. They’re depressed since there’s not enough,” said Berry.