Danica McKellar Quotes

I want to help middle-school girls stay interested in math and be good at it, and see it as friendly and accessible and not this scary thing. Everyone else in society tells them it's not for them. It's for nerdy white guys with pocket protectors.

I noticed there were so many people, especially women, who would come up to me having recognized me from TV and say, 'I heard you were a math person, why math? Oh my gosh, I could never do math!' I could just see their self-esteem crumbling; I thought that was silly, so I wanted to make math more friendly and accessible.

I was definitely one of those girls where my father would sit me at the dinner table and say, 'What's two plus two?' And I'd be like, 'Five!' He would shake his head. Math and science intimidated me.

Males and females can both have a fixed mindset about math and science, but it hurts girls more because they are on the negative end of the stereotype.

For quite some time, women at NASA only had scientific backgrounds.

I think that for a lot of women there's a subtle but unfortunately effective discouragement of women pursuing the STEM fields.

If I'm teaching girls that do love to make cookies and do love fashion - that they can use math as a part of that - you think that's me saying, come on girls you belong in the kitchen, you belong shopping? Or, do you think it's me showing them how math is part of all their life, even the part they thought it had nothing to do with?

If we want to get beyond this whole I'm-cool-because-I-care-about-women thing, what we really need to do is we have to start encouraging women to get engineering degrees in college.

At Swarthmore, the Dean of Women was very opposed to women going into science or engineering - so opposed that if she couldn't talk a girl out of it, she just never had anything more to do with her for the four years she was there.

A lot of people believe women can't do tech-y stuff. Becoming nerdy doesn't have to mean the short-haired guy, but can be the woman with very long, beautiful hair.

I had done quite a bit of research about math education when I spoke before Congress in 2000 about the importance of women in mathematics. The session of Congress was all about raising more scholarships for girls in college. I told them I felt that it's too late by college.

If you keep telling girls they're less good at science, that will probably be self-fulfilling. But there are quite a lot of women who are good at it.

I think actively promoting women in science is very important because the data has certainly shown that there has been an underrepresentation.

It's a sad day when a woman being funny and interested in science is considered newsworthy.

Very few women are creative. I would not send a daughter of mine to study physics.

I think the question is, are there women and have there been women who want to do science and could be doing great science, but they never really got the opportunity?

Negative gender stereotypes related to girls' education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics begin as early as primary school and have the devastating effect of making them doubt their own potential.

Girls are being left out of the conversation when it comes to technology, led to think of tech as insular and antisocial without ever being given a chance to correct those perceptions.

It's so great to be able to inspire these young women today to get involved in male-dominated subjects.

The absence of women within STEM programs is not only progressive, it is persistent - despite more than 20 years of programs intended to encourage the participation of girls and women.

When I was in 7th grade, we were all given an exam. It was science and math, and the boys who did well were skipped ahead so that when they got to be juniors or seniors in high school they would be able to go to the local community college and take calculus and physics there. And I wasn't skipped ahead.

When I was growing up, I had lots of smart classmates that were girls, but none of us were really pushed into math or computers or anything like that. Girls took AP history and AP English and AP European history. And boys took calculus and physics.

Sometimes, when you are one of only a couple of girls in an engineering class, you feel like you are representing women in general. That is a large burden to bear.

We still raise girls to look to other people for assurance they are attractive and smart, while boys are raised to determine their own value. Many girls are still made to feel it's not feminine to be good at science or math.

Given that many girls are indoctrinated to believe that they should be feminine and modest about their abilities, as well as brought up to assume that girls are not innately gifted at science or math, it is not surprising that so few can see themselves as successful computer scientists.