“I don’t think you have it in you, you might as well just give up”, my 6th-grade Math teacher said with a mix of exasperation and sarcasm. I looked at him and smiled awkwardly before turning back to my friend and giggling like those words hadn’t engraved themselves onto my heart.
15 years, an A* in Math, and a continuous string of scholarships later, I still remember his words. Despite his doubt, I did have it in me.
What had changed, you may ask?
I met teachers who believed in me and pushed me to be more than I thought I was capable of.
Call it a delusional sense of belief in your students, but when your female principal tells a student who barely passed the entrance exam, “I believe in you. You can and you will!”, it stirs something up. Something that feels borderline silly, but something that pushes you to start believing in yourself, too.
Something that lets you whisper to yourself phrases like “I can do it” or scribble on a post-it and paste on your wall, “You don’t want to look back and know you could’ve done better”. It makes you push yourself until you see results, and once you do, these results build up the confidence to produce even more goals, dreams, and successes.
A teacher is not just a person, they are a magical being that infuses hope and wonder, eventually inspiring students to take the steps needed to convert a dreamer into a doer.
The impact a teacher plays in a child’s life is extraordinarily unique, and even a small session may leave you either inspired or demoralized, possibly even changing the trajectory of your entire life. I say this without the slightest hint of exaggeration.
Multiple studies explore the topic of education, but there was one particular study that caught my interest. Retrieved from Annenberg Institute at Brown University and published in EdWorking Paper in May 2025, the study explores the role of gender in education.
Joshua Bleiberg, assistant professor at the university of Pittsburgh; Carly D. Robinson, senior researcher at Stanford; Evan Bennett, graduate student at Penn state; and Sussana Loeb, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, worked together to observe the effect of gender on learning and education, specifically in pursuing a STEM field.
They did this by finding 422 ninth graders taking the Algebra 1 course in New England schools and pairing them with opposite or same-gender tutors [1]. Over time, they unraveled a fascinating pattern.
Bleiberg et. al found that boys seemed to have a higher natural interest in STEM, and so there didn’t seem to be a significant difference regardless of whether they were tutored by a male or female teacher. However, this was drastically different for the girls! Girls paired with a female tutor not only did significantly better in the course, but also reported a higher interest in STEM fields overall [1].
Despite great efforts to bring women into STEM fields, there still seems to be a vast gap between the two genders in STEM careers [2]. A possible reason for this is a lack of interest/connection to math at an early age [3].
Hence, this study shows that female tutors are effectively bringing more girls into STEM and inspiring them to pursue a career that they may not have initially been interested in.
This study offers a revolutionary framework where Pakistani schools, academies, and personal tutoring services should not only perform similar studies to assess the relevance of such results in Pakistan, but also begin galvanizing women to take on more leading roles in education, specifically for male-dominated STEM-relevant subjects like Math. Services like “Dot and Line Pakistan” or “Teach for Pakistan” are a perfect example of steps towards this change, as their services connect young girls with skilled female teachers in a safe and growth-mindset-centered setting, inspiring them to pursue STEM-relevant fields.
This article is not meant to dissuade opposite-gender teachers, but to galvanize female teachers to step up and join the vast amounts of already present change-makers in education. Together, we can help change things for the better!
References:
- Bleiberg, J., Robinson, C. D., Bennett, E., & Loeb, S. (2025). The Impact of Tutor Gender Match on Girls’ STEM Interest, Engagement, and Performance.
- Charlesworth, T. E., & Banaji, M. R. (2019). Gender in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics: Issues, causes, solutions. Journal of Neuroscience, 39(37), 7228-7243.
- Blanchard Kyte, S., & Riegle-Crumb, C. (2017). Perceptions of the social relevance of science: exploring the implications for gendered patterns in expectations of majoring in STEM fields. Social Sciences, 6(1), 19.
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