“Women bring something different”: The intense world of gifted women

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The Babblery
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“Women bring something different”: The intense world of gifted women
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Trigger warning: This episode invokes the G-word.

Pox on he who coined the use of “gifted,” with its whiff of elitism and implication that others have no gifts. The word itself doesn’t cause all the difficulties that gifted women have navigating this world, but it certainly doesn’t help. But no matter how many other terms have been thrown around by gifted educators, psychologists, and parents, it is the term you need if you want to find the information that changed our guests’ lives.

This episode features the experiences and thoughts of six gifted women: Deborah Ruf, Nicole Tetreault, Lea Sublarec,  Candice Price, Joanne Foster, and Joy Navan. Seven if you include the musings of host Suki Wessling, known as “Prof.” Suki in her day job, teaching online courses for gifted kids.

“[In the past,] bright women were just weird and they called them mental hermaphrodites,” says Lea Stublarec, a researcher whose books about gifted women and their daughters are in production. “It was considered an insult that women would have the brains of both a male and a female because they were so smart.”

In these conversations, you’ll hear that the idea that smart girls and women are “weird” is hardly a thing of the past. Candice Price is a Black mathematician who says that giftedness in women is considered an “abnormality” even today.

“There are many wonderfully talented Black women in STEM; still, the percentage does not reflect the population at all,” Price explains. “When I think about gifted women, we come in all shapes, sizes. I think that young gifted girls are often missed because of the viewpoint of giftedness as an abnormality.”

Giftedness touches every area of gifted women’s external lives: treatment by parents, teachers, and peers; life options presented to them; sexist assumptions based on their looks and clothing. But giftedness also touches these women’s internal lives. In this episode, we explore the many ways that giftedness influences the lived experiences of gifted women.

“We all have differences, and we all have gifts, but that’s different from saying everybody’s exactly the same in what they have to work with,” says educator Deborah Ruf. “[Being gifted is] not about being better and it’s not about not living up to your potential because you’re lazy or anything like that. It’s about finding what your strengths are so… you can make a difference in the world.”

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Women bring something different to the table: The intense world of gifted women

 

Segment 1: The G-word
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[00:00:00] Deborah Ruf: There are smart people, highly intelligent people, bright people, a whole continuum of abilities in every race and group in the world. it really is about opportunity for some of them to ever show up.

[00:00:49] Nicole Tetreault: She said, I think you need to get tested for a learning difference. And then that’s would open the door for me to realize like, oh my gosh, um, [00:01:00] something, you know, I, my brain learns differently. I learn differently.

[00:01:04] Lea Stublarec: They have more intense drives, feelings, and anxieties, and they tend to be more physically and emotionally sensitive. The impact that this has on their lives, often goes unacknowledged in our culture.

[00:01:16] Candice Price: There are many wonderfully talented Black women in STEM, still the percentage does not reflect the population at all.

[00:01:24] Lea Stublarec: For many, many years, the, the, Zeitgeist or whatever it was that bright women were just weird and that they , they called them mental hermaphrodites.

[00:01:33] Joy Navan: I can remember a good friend, that a number of years ago when I said I was going back to school after I retired to study clinical psychology and become a therapist, she said, can’t you just retire?

Intro
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[00:01:44] Suki Wessling: Can’t you just be someone, something you’re not? That’s a common theme in today’s episode. I’m your host, Suki Wessling, and today we’re going to use the G word and not apologize for it. That’s

[00:01:59] Deborah Ruf: Gifted

[00:01:59] Nicole Tetreault: [00:02:00] gifted woman

[00:02:00] Candice Price: gifted

[00:02:01] Lea Stublarec: gifted girls

[00:02:02] Joy Navan: gifted

[00:02:03] Joanne Foster: gifted

[00:02:03] Lea Stublarec: gifted daughters

[00:02:04] Joy Navan: gifted women

[00:02:05] Suki Wessling: That’s the G word, and any parent, teacher, or gifted person can tell you that the word is loaded in our society.

[00:02:12] Joanne Foster: I really have problems with that label. even though I’ve been in the field for so many years, somehow to me, label belongs on a drawer, not on a person.

[00:02:20] Suki Wessling: Let’s go ahead and open that drawer. When applied to women, you take that loaded word, add centuries of oppression and stereotypes of women, and you get a mess. I’m going to try to clear up that mess for you this hour with the help of a host of women, themselves gifted, who have spent their careers learning about different aspects of the gifted brain and lived their lives in the reality that smart women exist in a marginal space. Even now, with how far we’ve come, gifted girls often get inappropriate parenting and education. Gifted women often hide behind screens that they constructed as children, and giftedness itself is dismissed, debated, or demonized. Let’s [00:03:00] face it, it all starts with that word. Gifted implies that other people do not have gifts, which is not true. But as much as educators and psychologists have tried to invent new terms or not use the word at all, gifted seems stuck in our vocabulary, dragging all the baggage it’s accumulated behind it.

We’re going to unpack the experiences of gifted girls and women, starting with the word itself. My guests will introduce themselves and then the facet of giftedness that most informs their work and life experiences.

And I’ll start. Because when I’m not making this radio show, I’m Professor Suki, a teacher of gifted kids, a profession I fell into after I negotiated trying to figure out how to raise and educate my own children.

Like many of you listeners, I had distaste for the word, until I needed to do a Google search and the G word was the only one that got me where I needed to go.

The research I did led me to understand that giftedness in many children presents itself as a special [00:04:00] need, and that special need, especially in girls, is often not met.

Let’s start by meeting each of our guests and hearing their definition of giftedness.

What is giftedness?
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[00:04:10] Nicole Tetreault: Hi, I’m Nicole Tetreault. I’m a neuroscientist, meditation teacher, and a speaker and an author. And I love helping people wire their minds for love and talking about what it is to be a gifted woman and navigating in the world.

I think gifted is multifaceted, and I think it’s sort of extraordinary exceptionalities where people are asynchronous and that they can, you know, have abilities of very high, um, output, um, highly creative out of the box thinkers. And then I would also say that there can be these alternative types of [00:05:00] exceptionalities that can make for different behaviors and thinking, uh, that can cause challenges or differences that may not align up with societal expectations and values.

[00:05:13] Deborah Ruf: Hi, I’m Deborah Ruf and I’m a high intelligence specialist. And what I do is share what it took me a lifetime to learn, about what makes us all tick as far as where we fit in, how we’re different from others, and what we might need to know about ourselves so that we can present the way we really want to present.

Gifted identification and labeling falls into two camps. One is about how well you do, how, how much you get good grades and succeed and have, careers that pay well and have high influence and you get into different kinds of categories of achievement. And other people, and this is where I am, are about the essence [00:06:00] of the person.

And this means who are they? What makes them tick? How does intelligence impact the way they see the world, the way they solve problems, the way school works or doesn’t work for them. It’s a very obviously different way, there’s not a whole lot of continuum there.

[00:06:18] Candice Price: Hi, my name is Candice Price. Uh, I’m an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Smith College in Massachusetts. I’m originally from California. I have, uh, all of my degrees in mathematics and I am wrestling with a five month old today, just trying to get him to nap. So we’ll see how that goes. But, I’m interested in applied mathematics, a lot of work around applying math to social justice questions, as well as questions in biology.

So how would I define giftedness? I guess I would say, in general giftedness is [00:07:00] probably seen as this more than an innate skill like, uh, in certain areas, probably far above others, showing a talent or a skill in an area that, exceeds what we would normally think is just common.

I think that’s probably what the general audience or general folks would think is giftedness. I might personally add maybe just like, uh, excitement towards an area just really wanting to explore it and spend a lot of time thinking about a certain topic. I think giftedness comes in in that way as well.

[00:07:38] Lea Stublarec: My name’s Lea Stublarec and I am a mother of two adult gifted girls. I’ve, I’ve done a lot of different things in my life. I’m old. And so I, spent a number of years doing research, for Berkeley planning associates for associated with Cal and also Stanford University and the American Institutes for [00:08:00] Research.

I have a master’s in social work, and did research in the social sciences and education. Then when my youngest daughter went off to college, I decided to get a certificate as a parent coach and focus on coaching parents of gifted daughters.

Giftedness is high intellectual ability. Basically measured by IQ test. A mildly gifted person has an IQ of 115 to 130, moderately 130 to 145, highly 145 to 160, and profoundly 160 or above. I think that we sometimes think that gifted people should quote, just be smarter and we don’t appreciate that they are unique.

[00:08:43] Joy Navan: Hi, I’m Dr. Joy Navan. My students like to call me Dr. Joy. I’m a retired public school teacher, resource teacher for the gifted, professor of gifted education licensed psychological associate for gifted individuals, both children and adults, [00:09:00] and currently an educational consultant for the Amend Group. And I’m also a writer.

Giftedness for me is an awareness of one’s intellectual intensity as well as one’s emotional intensity. So giftedness is a construct, a psychological construct, that describes how we go about the world in many ways.

[00:09:28] Joanne Foster: My name is Joanne Foster, and I’ve been working in the field of gifted education for about 40 years. Hard to believe, but true. my educational background is in educational psychology and gifted education, I’ve been working with kids, parents, teachers, prospective teachers, community, different groups of parents for all these years, helping them to, provide the best possible education for kids across the spectrum, but of course in the area of gifted education as well. [00:10:00] I’ve written eight books. The concept of gifted education is that it is a type of special education. It does fall under that umbrella, but the goal of gifted education should be to find and implement the best possible educational match for any particular child in alignment with their interests and their ability and remembering to keep it flexible.

[00:10:25] Suki Wessling: Listening to all these different professionals talking about giftedness, you will notice what Deborah called the two camps, measured cognitive abilities versus the psychological repercussions of high intelligence. I don’t see this as a split in the gifted community so much as a difference of emphasis. A university that runs, for example, a magnet program for gifted youth is going to be mostly interested in those youth’s cognitive abilities, thus test scores, academic achievements, and honors.

A psychologist, on the other hand, will be interested in how high cognitive function correlates with life experiences, [00:11:00] thus social relationships, mental health, and wider criteria for measuring success.

To illustrate this, we can lean on a cultural stereotype of the little professor. This is a child who may be years ahead in math and use a college level vocabulary, both measurable abilities. But at the same time, he may have obsessive interests, which isolate him from other children, leading to a need for a teacher who understands the social and emotional needs of gifted people.

But the fact that I chose this child, obviously a boy, as my archetype starts a sketch of the lives of gifted girls who are often unrecognized and misunderstood. Lea takes us back into the history of human understanding of intelligence with this information on how women’s intelligence was viewed by men at the turn of the 20th century.

[00:11:48] Lea Stublarec: There was for many, many years, the, uh, Zeitgeist or whatever it was that bright women were just weird and that they were, they called them mental hermaphrodites.

And back, back in [00:12:00] the day, that was considered an insult that women would have the brains of both a male and a female because they were so smart. There was another theory that was really popular around the late 1800s, early 1900s, called the variability hypothesis.

And in that it stated that women were a homogenous group in terms of intellectual ability as opposed to men who are heterogeneous. And, you know, they said for better or worse for men, there are a lot more men who are in institutions because they’re at one end, but there are a lot more men who are able to be highly gifted and therefore eminent. And the big thing was women can’t be gifted because there are no eminent women.

Well, this wonderful psychologist and feminist, Leta Hollingworth, she did a lot of research in this. And it’s interesting one of, one of her motivators was after she got married, graduated from college, I believe, and got married, she wanted to be a teacher and she wasn’t allowed to be a teacher because she was married.

And so then she decided to get [00:13:00] into research. She studied the variability thing and, actually showed with the use of IQ tests that had just kind of been popular that there were a lot of women outliers who scored very highly on these tests. And her thing was that unlike men, women can’t procreate unhindered.

[00:13:17] Suki Wessling: And there we have the essential difference between men’s and women’s intelligence. Women’s intelligence comes bundled inseparably inside women’s bodies. When parents and educators encounter a girl, many of our unquestioned assumptions and biases kick in. In the past, those biases often led women to teaching, a career which nurtured a number of the founders of modern gifted research.

Here’s Deborah.

[00:13:42] Deborah Ruf: I am a child of the 50s and 60s and a woman of the early 70s, and I thought the only route I had was to teach school if I wanted a career. And so I did that, and then I started to have children and [00:14:00] realized they’re not getting their needs met in school. And I wondered what was wrong with schools, what was maybe wrong with them.

[00:14:08] Suki Wessling: Joanne points out that when she started teaching, there was no such thing as gifted education, so she had to invent it.

[00:14:15] Joanne Foster: There was a principle who kind of found me and said, you know, we are starting a gifted program in this particular area of schools and we want you to be the teacher. And I looked at him and I said, there is no such thing and where do I learn about this and why me?

And he said, well, you’re creative and you’re capable So be a pioneer. I said okay I’m going to do this and I had the very first gifted program in this what was called the family of schools in the day.

There was no curriculum. I made it up myself. The kids came to me for half a day. So I was teaching math and they were selected by their teachers as needing something extra, something exciting, something to keep them motivated and learning.

So I ended up going back to university. I got [00:15:00] a doctoral degree in human development and applied psychology with a specialization in gifted education.

[00:15:06] Suki Wessling: Like most women of their generation, neither Deborah nor Joanne was identified as gifted as a child, but the childhood stories they tell make it clear why they gravitated toward studying giftedness as adults.

[00:15:18] Joanne Foster: When I was in kindergarten, um, I coughed a lot and the teacher went to my mother and said, she’s coughing all the time. Like what’s going on here? And my mother said she’s bored. So it’s something to do. Right, so the teacher sort of got wise to that and then they wanted me to accelerate and just skip grade one but we ended up moving So we went to a new school and I started in grade one and then it was a fabulous school And I still live in the same neighborhood actually and so do my kids, which is phenomenal.

And I still have friends from that grade one class., believe it or not.

[00:15:46] Deborah Ruf: I was nearsighted, and it hadn’t been diagnosed yet. And so I was not seen as, an especially precocious child as far as I can tell.

I didn’t get the best grades. But my mother didn’t care about grades. [00:16:00] My dad only cared if I was a cute little girl. And then we moved into a community when I was in fourth grade where it was so obvious I didn’t fit.

And I ended up being like the teacher’s helper on everything. I helped grade papers. I helped run different offices in the school. I, I just, for fourth, fifth, sixth grade, I was just not in my classroom seat very often. But I didn’t think of myself as special in any way.

[00:16:35] Suki Wessling: Joy Navan, of the same generation as Joanne and Deborah, wrote this in her book about gifted elders.

[00:16:41] Joy Navan: We did not hear the word gifted as a child. We thought we were odd. Even as we age, it is difficult to say I am a gifted adult. We realize differences in our reasoning, but mostly in our feelings. When loved ones hurt, we [00:17:00] feel physical pain. A breathtaking sunset brings tears to our eyes.

We lie awake at night, wishing we could set things right in the world. We labor to internalize the wisdom of Candide to tend our own garden. And when we do, it is with an intensity that could ignite the universe.

Living with Intensity
—

[00:17:21] Suki Wessling: Joy’s description of gifted elders touches on one of the most misunderstood aspects of the gifted brain. Just as gifted people’s brains think intensely about their areas of interest, they also work intensely on whatever is around them.

Young people’s emotional intensity is often misunderstood as misbehavior, and so one of the challenges they face is how to respond to that. Girls, who are more likely to be socialized to be people pleasers, find it less acceptable to stick out.

[00:17:49] Joy Navan: So intensity is truly, an emotional intensity, that, for example, might show itself in, just an overabundance of empathy, [00:18:00] crying for the bug that threw itself against the lamppost and died from from the heat or the brightness. As I mentioned, when we feel really close to someone, that feeling of emotional intensity to the point where our love can consume us, that that is all that we are capable of.

[00:18:21] Suki Wessling: Intensities can also be expressed as heightened sensory sensitivity. Parents of gifted kids trade stories of kids who won’t wear socks with seams, kids who rudely mention grandma’s bad smell, or their teen who can’t stand to be in a crowd.

[00:18:36] Joy Navan: You know, unfortunately, I think a lot of us learn as we’re being socialized and as we’re growing up to hide our intensities, to put them under a bushel basket, so to speak.

[00:18:52] Suki Wessling: Nicole talks about how gifted people need to learn to navigate this sensory overload.

[00:18:57] Nicole Tetreault: They have to learn skills. You know, [00:19:00] I always talk about how we can have high levels of sensory processing when you’re gifted, you know, and that could be in all five senses. And for example, if, you know, fluorescent lights activate, nervousness, you know. and.

And in some kids, fluorescent lights can be stimulating, over activating, and then, they could have an emotional disregulation in relation to that. I also say, you know, by the time they’re adults, they can’t walk into a board meeting and say, you know, you need to shut off the fluorescent lights or else I’m gonna lose it.

[00:19:37] Suki Wessling: When we return, we’ll explore some of the research that illuminates the experiences of gifted girls and women.

Segment 2: Research into gifted girls and womenEducation
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[00:20:00] I’m your host Suki Wessling, and we are speaking with educators, researchers, and psychologists who work with gifted children and adults. Some of the experiences that gifted kids of any gender share revolve around education. For a person whose brain is on overdrive. Education is important to their lives. Not only in the usual ways, But also in a way that touches their core identity. We heard from members of our elder generation, that their schooling was difficult. But Candace price has a similar story from a millennial upbringing.

[00:20:59] Candice Price: My mom [00:21:00] noticed that I was bored in my classes because I was picking things up rather quickly.

I was actually in a fourth grade, fifth grade split and I was doing the fifth graders’ homework while in fourth grade and watching the lessons and understanding it. I can’t imagine that my instructor was having that hard of a time teaching fifth grade math but maybe made a small mistake and I was correcting him or something, you know. And so I would come home and I would tell my mom how bored I was and she went back to the school and she said, I, I think it’s really important that my daughter is not bored.

I think she’ll get into a lot of trouble if she’s bored. She’ll disrupt the space. We’ve got to think about ways to, um, engage her more. And so because of that, I was tested and, I got to skip into the 5th grade from the 4th grade, so I stayed in my classroom and was doing the 5th grade work, and then I started a Gifted and Talented program for middle school, so grades 7 and 8, and [00:22:00] I think that that really changed my viewpoint on this idea of giftedness because I got to see it as a route, a positive route, uh, a route forward to opportunities, things like that. Instead of being sort of tracked as a kid who is going to be disruptive in the classroom, is going to be a troublemaker. I mean, they probably still thought I was a troublemaker because that sort of thing gets embedded in you a little bit.

[00:22:27] Suki Wessling: Candice touches on an important aspect of the experience of gifted brains, which is that these kids often exhibit behavior in response to boredom or frustration, but that behavior is misinterpreted by the adults around them as anything from inattention to disobedience.

Despite stereotypes to the contrary, gifted learners are often not the well behaved kids in a class. Lea Stublarec has a good analogy to explain why.

[00:22:51] Lea Stublarec: If you’ve ever gone to a workshop where you already know everything they’re talking about, you can sit there and look at your phone or scribble or get up and leave. [00:23:00] In most schools, children don’t have that option. So it really is sad what we’re doing to a lot of gifted children, how we’re killing their spark and their motivation.

As a child, Deborah Ruf moved from inattention to chattiness once she had a friend to share her frustration with.

[00:23:14] Deborah Ruf: I just remember the kind of clock that was in the room had a a second hand that went around with a little click, and I stared at that clock every day, every year, waiting for school to end, because it was so tedious, and I had trouble making friends. A girl accidentally got put in my room when she moved into town. They never would have put us together if they’d realized we were going to be talking all the time. Over time, like by the time we were in 11th grade, we were both discouraged from taking honors chemistry because, you know, we were girls.

And we didn’t know what to make of that. Because, but we [00:24:00] went into the regular chemistry. Within a week or so, the young man teacher, he was probably, it was his first teaching job out of college. He said, why are you two in here? And that’s the first time I really realized we had been led astray.

Identifying gifted girls and women
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[00:24:19] Suki Wessling: As a mathematician, Candice works with young women in STEM. While verbally adept girls face less pressure in schools than they used to, girls are still actively discouraged from showing their aptitude in math class.

[00:24:33] Candice Price: So I think we try to train women and young girls specifically to not show, a giftedness. It’s not something that, as I mentioned before, is celebrated. So I think when young girls start to show I’m gifted in this area or I’m, I’m interested in this, it, can sometimes be viewed by others as maybe a bit bossy or show offy and [00:25:00] not meek.

And, at some point in our lives, young girls and women are taught that we shouldn’t overshadow males in our spaces. And so, showing that you’re talented in an area also shows that you might perhaps understand something or be better at something than some of your male counterparts and that’s not celebrated.

I mean because the, the goal I think in our society is that women are supposed to attract men to take care of us and we can’t do that if we’re better than them. So I think that a lot of times it is not viewed as a positive thing but viewed more as a disruption in the path that women are supposed to take.

And so I think that because of that, once it’s noticed, I think it gets stamped out pretty quickly or ignored. And then as bright and brilliant as these young women are, they realize, okay, so this is not something that’s positive and I shouldn’t go this [00:26:00] route and I should ignore it. And, um, I think often what happens is Then it’s a a talent or a love that’s hidden or not nurtured.

[00:26:07] Suki Wessling: Deborah is expert at testing young children, a skill that requires certain, shall we say, intuitive powers on the part of the tester.

The children have to be encouraged to keep moving through harder and harder questions to find the edge of their problem solving skills. Children who are profoundly gifted, the highest level, often exhaust the questions. But in the case of girls, Deborah has noticed, their scores are sometimes depressed because the tester has to understand possible gender based differences in order to complete the test.

[00:26:37] Deborah Ruf: One of my favorite things about a little girl who ended up testing at my level five, she’s profoundly gifted, she’s an adult now. Her parents brought her in and we were testing as one does, and she was loving the test, she was just loving it, but at some point she said, okay, I think I’ve done enough, and [00:27:00] I said, well, you know, I can only give you final scores if you do all the things.

And she said, well, I think I’ve done enough. And I said, but I can’t give you any of the points for the things you haven’t done. It’s alright with me if you want to stop now, fine, but I can’t give you the points. And she stood on her chair, put her hands on the table in front of her and leaned over toward me and said, I want the points.

You will see people who have learned how to be good students, more girls than boys, and they think good grades are what make them smart.

So they, they aren’t thinking. They get in for the test or they get into a special class and they’re trying to read the teacher. What does my mother want? What does my teacher want? And they aren’t thinking for themselves.

Socialization
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[00:27:53] Lea Stublarec: I call it developmental curveballs that gifted girls face.

[00:27:57] Suki Wessling: Lea is in the process of publishing [00:28:00] books about her research into gifted mothers and daughters.

[00:28:03] Lea Stublarec: At the preschool level, researchers have found that gifted girls and boys typically don’t differentiate between genders and intelligence level. However, they found that starting around age six, if you can believe that, at age six, girls start to think that boys are the only ones who can be really, really smart.

And then they start to disengage from activities and games or whatever that they think are for really smart people.

[00:28:29] Candice Price: At a pretty young age, I watched a lot of like math TV. Uh, I watched this great show called Square One which was on PBS. And so my love for mathematics, I think, came from that.

[00:28:44] Lea Stublarec: Then around middle school, there’s another huge developmental curveball for girls. When they start to be negatively judged because of their high intelligence, and it impacts them in their standing in the social order.

And this is really hard for many of them because when they were in [00:29:00] elementary school, they typically were the leaders and the ones who were looked up to. And Barbara Kerr, who is a big researcher, especially in the world of female giftedness, points out that soon after puberty, gifted girls undergo great change, a restructuring of personality that’s far more extreme than in girls of average intelligence. She thinks that the cause of this is the result of the change in society’s attitudes towards her. She said until puberty, a gifted girl has often been rewarded and encouraged for her intellectual achievements. But with adolescence, her attractiveness to boys and the impact of giftedness upon her likeability begin to worry her parents, who only want her to be happy, and they fear that happiness doesn’t come to girls who are different.

So they start to praise her appearance more and show more interest in her social life, and perhaps unconsciously trivialize or gloss over her intellectual achievement.

[00:29:56] Suki Wessling: This painful period, middle school, is [00:30:00] painful for most of us, but because a gifted girl’s intelligence is fundamental to her sense of self, she’s often been defined by intelligence in school previous to this time, the need to hide intelligence becomes a need to hide the self.

[00:30:15] Lea Stublarec: But it wasn’t until middle school where a lot of things converged and the daughters at that point started to don, as I call it, protective gear. And for gifted females, this can take, and Barbara Kerr I’ve used a lot of her material for this, it’s either thorns, shells, or masks.

And there was one fascinating daughter who developed false personalities to deal with how difficult the situation was for her. But most of the daughters in my study developed what I call thorns. So they became very defiant. They rebelled against authority. They questioned the status quo. They were more self righteous and aggressive. And it made social interactions [00:31:00] with them and their teachers, as well as their parents, kind of prickly.

[00:31:03] Suki Wessling: Deborah points out that puberty is when many brains start to display attributes that we identify as more male or more female. Although, of course, there is a huge gender variability across the population, you start seeing high school boys exhibit masculine behaviors that are seen as more intellectual,while girls might start expressing their intelligence in ways that traditionally we don’t pair with intelligence.

[00:31:28] Deborah Ruf: The corpus callosum in the brain is different for males and females, and there is more permeability and cross over to the hemisphere’s access in females than males.

And so when you hear the phrase a one track mind. There are more males that have a one track mind and they get fixated on a topic and they don’t look out [00:32:00] of it as much as a female. So female brains, that’s one of the reasons the idea of women’s intuition? Their intelligence shows up in how they put pieces together.

They can take disparate facts and occasions and information and turn it into a theory and a solution very differently than a male does. And so sometimes this gets in the way of them answering the, the straightforward question because they see more nuance in more things than the typical male.

[00:32:37] Suki Wessling: As an expert in educational psychology, Joanne Foster says that this period is especially damaging to girls whose passions may lie in areas that are still male dominated.

[00:32:47] Joanne Foster: I think that, what we need to be concerned about is whether or not the girls are getting the kinds of learning that they need, whether or not there is, that equity happening, that gender equity [00:33:00] policy and, and, and practices in schools, especially for the, um, the STEM subjects, the science, technology, engineering, math.

What’s ended up happening over the years is that there seems to be a bit of a bias in terms of the, um, measures of testing of those abilities. So we have to be very careful around making sure that we’re providing girls with the kinds of opportunities to proceed and excel.

[00:33:25] Suki Wessling: Hearkening back to Deborah’s five-year-old girl who would’ve bailed on the test had Deborah not sussed out how to motivate her, Joanne points out the educators would do well to consider all of their students potentially gifted.

[00:33:37] Joanne Foster: We need to keep in mind that no two kids are alike. And we also, at the same time, have to think in terms of not looking at just the label, whether or not a child has actually been formally identified as gifted or not, but looking at the person, looking at what they need, not whether or not they’ve got some sort of Post-it, you know, to their forehead that says gifted or learning disabled or, you know, boy or girl, whatever it might [00:34:00] be, we have to look at the individual and not lose sight of that because it’s critically, critically important.

And that’s, that’s how we should proceed with any child’seducation, looking at what they need in terms of matching up their learning opportunities with what their needs and capabilities are at a given time.

How we view gifted women
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[00:34:17] Suki Wessling: If that sounds like a tough job, it is. Humanity is a continuum and we develop unevenly. We don’t hit a certain age and shed our not reader shell and then become a reader, for example, and we don’t develop along a single path. The concept of asynchronous development is an important one for understanding gifted kids. How can this kid be gifted, an English teacher might ask, if they can’t write an essay? But that same kid could be years ahead in math or in spatial reasoning. It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of culture on any person’s development. We all grow up not only in the baggage of expectations built into our cultures, but also in comparison to the history of our people. Candice Price [00:35:00] points out that our culture’s focus on the few eminent women of the past might condition us for a skewed vision of what a gifted woman of today might be like.

[00:35:10] Candice Price: Giftedness in women if I’m thinking about how society views it, I would say that it’s maybe not seen very often, um, unfortunately by society, this giftedness in women. Perhaps even it’s thought of as gifted in a sense of also being awkward or abnormal. I think that there are lots of cultural examples of women who are gifted, but they’re also abnormal. Women have been sort of painted in this role of being nurturing, of being mothers, of taking care of the home, of thinking about other people first.

And I think a lot of the examples that we have of gifted women are women who are single, on their own, sort of forging a path and not thinking about others so much. And I [00:36:00] wouldn’t say that that’s a true statement about women, but I think that that’s what is shown to us in a lot of different ways.

[00:36:06] Suki Wessling: Candice’s organization, Mathematically Gifted and Black, works to encourage young Black mathematicians. Candice explains why representation is especially important for Black girls who are interested in STEM fields.

[00:36:19] Candice Price: I do think it is much harder for Black girls to, to develop their giftedness, especially in STEM. And one of the reasons because there aren’t a lot of pictures of Black women in STEM. I think we got very lucky, we’re very blessed that the movie Hidden Figures came out. That was a remarkable film.

But there aren’t any others like that. Um, especially for Black women. And so because of that reason, when you don’t see yourself in that space, it’s hard to know that you can be in that space. And then on top of that, when others don’t see you in that space, they don’t [00:37:00] picture you there.

So, you’re in a classroom, you’re asking these questions, and someone can say, but you’re not supposed to ask questions like this. You must be just doing it to cause problems. Because little Black girls aren’t supposed to think about mathematics. They’re not supposed to think about STEM and things like that. Instead of just noticing that the behavior is very similar and they’re like, oh, we should also test these children because, you know, they may also be really, showing, uh, a talent for mathematics or a talent for science or a talent for reading, anything like that, I think what what happens is that they sort of put into a corner of like, you’re a troublemaker, you sit in this corner and don’t disturb the class with your questions, with your inquiry.

And I think what that does is it, one, tells a student that they have to be a child, that they need to separate themselves from the group. If they ask any [00:38:00] questions and they don’t belong in that space, and I think it also lets them think that the, the intelligence that they have, the talent, the giftedness is bad, because they’re being punished for it.

There’s punitivity. And then they’re tracked as like a, bad kids. So then, and I think we all know this, right, that teachers talk. And so they’re like, oh, you got this kid in your class. They’re a bad student. They can’t sit down. They disrupt the class. And often their disruptions are just curiosity.

[00:38:32] Suki Wessling: When we return, the Babblery will investigate ways to nurture gifted girls and women to their full potential.

Segment 3: Nurturing gifted women
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[00:39:00]

[00:39:26] Suki Wessling: I’m your host, Suki Wessling. We’ve been discussing giftedness in girls and women and how high intellectual potential creates challenges in parenting and education. In this last segment, we turn to important ways that parents, teachers, and our culture in general can support gifted girls and women who often don’t fit the standard gifted child stereotype. We start with the idea of role models and mentors. Here’s Joy Navan.

Parents and mentors
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[00:39:53] Joy Navan: in my own experience, I was very, very fortunate to have a mother who [00:40:00] was extremely gifted, probably profoundly gifted, although society didn’t recognize that necessarily. Who was a consummate educator, who served as a role model for me to aspire to. So I can remember like it was yesterday, my first grade teacher coming home to our house for a visit and saying, now your daughter will go very far. And my mother saying, of course she will. So yeah, I, I probably got criticized for raising my hand too often or for speaking out in class. When all the boys could speak out in class and not get criticized or, and, and over the years I’m sure I had that, but I guess I always bought into the duality of myself as a female, that I was a very capable and self [00:41:00] regulating female at the same time that I was in a society where, where in order for me to be accepted I had to add a little softness to that capability. Not that I was always, I certainly wasn’t always successful at that by any stretch.

[00:41:18] Suki Wessling: Nicole Tetreault, like many gifted kids, wasn’t a particularly stellar student. She is what is called twice exceptional, gifted with a learning disability. It took the support of a professor in college to set her on the academic path where she belonged.

[00:41:33] Nicole Tetreault: My professor at the time, Leo Chalupa, said, Nicole, I don’t get it. Why is your GPA what it is? And here you are like a superstar in the lab. And I said, well, I wasn’t identified as being dyslexic until six months ago. So that’s why my, um, GPA sucks. And he said, well, if you want to just come and get a PhD here, you are more than capable. So I [00:42:00] think the point is that what we need is we need mentors and teachers and educators and parents to see the potential, um, beyond what a external measurement of a standard grade is. And when we think about, you know, multiple intelligences, and we think about how people could have specific gifts and areas, um, that, that’s really where we to be looking at potentiality, um, and not limit kids, not limit adults.

[00:42:34] Suki Wessling: Candice Price remembers a similar experience.

[00:42:38] Candice Price: I was in a pre calculus class and really enjoying the mathematics. And, my instructor at the time said to me, you know, you’re pretty good at this. You should think about majoring in math. And I said, I can’t, I can’t major in math. You have to be a genius. I thought that you had to be a genius like Einstein to major in mathematics, to do [00:43:00] mathematics.

[00:43:00] Suki Wessling: On top of having mentors in real life, Candice points out the strong influence of popular culture on girls’ self-image.

[00:43:07] Candice Price: There’s a filter that happens. And even though it happens for every demographic, I think the filter is so much stronger for young Black girls. The influence of popular culture on how, young girls see each other, obviously is huge. I, I mean, otherwise, why would we have the kind of commercialization of, uh, of, these sports stars, of these pop stars, of the clothes, the makeup, the toys, all of that.

If it, if it had no impact, no influence. I mean, the idea of, uh, the Barbie doctor, right? Dr. Barbie or Barbie President Barbie, right? Those are huge things that have had, like, they had to make those toys to show young girls, but oh, these are also jobs you can have. Lieutenant O’Hara on, Star Trek had a huge impact, even as a fictional character, um, huge impact.

And then with Hidden [00:44:00] Figures, these were real women that we could look to and say, oh, this is a real thing that happened.

Coming into herself in old age
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[00:44:06] Suki Wessling: Important world events can have a deep impact on how girls see their futures. Deborah Ruf’s generation lived through an actual revolution, this one in the form of a pill that changed their relationship to the world and to their bodies.

[00:44:21] Deborah Ruf: The most important person or invention or thing that made a difference in the way the world was functioning was the birth control pill. Yep, and that just made a world of difference.

But for my generation, especially those years, those critical years we were in late high school or in college, it threw everything out of whack. All those things we were told to do, how to behave, and so on. It’s like, women’s lib, uh, what’s, sexual freedom, all that kind of stuff came up. And we were kind of left thinking, I don’t know what to think anymore, I don’t know [00:45:00] what to believe. And I look at that trajectory that so many in my age group assumed and did and realize there could be a lot of late bloomers who are my age.

It’s because they didn’t get a chance to bloom any earlier. And I see that in so many women where I have to persuade them, listen, you really can do things that you want to do. Now, you’ve just got to figure out now that you can, how will you?

[00:45:34] Joy Navan: Most of the gifted elders that I approached did not know they were gifted. My background in giftedness and my ability, I was trained by Annemarie Roper in qualitative assessment of the gifted. And so, my background allowed me to see their abilities, their intellectual rage to know, um, I like to call it [00:46:00] the intellectual imperative, their intensities, um, in terms of their emotional, physical, psychosocial, all of the different, psychological constructs which they live to an intensity.

Learning to live with intensity
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[00:46:13] Suki Wessling: It’s that intensity which Joy mentions that distinguishes gifted women from their counterparts. Their brains aren’t just working on overdrive to solve mathematical problems or write books. Their brains are also just simply working on overdrive all the time. Lea explains how this intensity translates into an extra burden for gifted women, especially when they become mothers.

[00:46:37] Lea Stublarec: They’re really struggling to do something called feed their lion because these are gifted women and they feel like there’s this, this huge intellectual aspect of their lives that they really can’t focus on or put any energy into.

And as I learned from the majority of the women I interviewed, 77%, they managed to come up with a balance in their lives between, [00:47:00] quote, feeding their lion and, and finding intellectual pursuits and interests, as well as feeding their souls . I think that’s what being a mother and having the blessing slash burden of being the primary caregiver enables you to do because you can develop such a deep, close, personal connection to your children.

[00:47:23] Deborah Ruf: The reality of having children is another feature that does make a big difference because it happens during those career forming years. And if you’re going to pay a lot, it, it really is so necessary for the fathers and the mothers both to share in the timing of child care and really both be present for their children in some way.

And we need a system that enables that, that [00:48:00] makes it possible. Those should be, uh, A time of their lives, that family’s lives, where they get lots of support, lots of understanding, and lots of opportunity for both parents that still allow them to get to their children’s sporting and music and plays and so on, and bedtimes.

Moving forward
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[00:48:20] Suki Wessling: One of the first Babblery interviews was with women scientists. Two of the scientists were graduate students, gifted young women with passionate interests. They pointed out that science is stronger when practiced by diverse people. If only middle class white men look at a problem, they only see the potential solutions that their life experiences and knowledge lead them to.

Just having women in the room changes the conversation, deepens it, widens it, and yes, sometimes makes it more contentious. Because the work that faces us now as a species takes everyone sitting at the table to come up with solutions, not just in science, but in all aspects of life. We’ve created a world [00:49:00] where, more than ever, we are all interdependent.

[00:49:03] Deborah Ruf: Women bring something different to the table and there’s so many reasons for that, but it shows us why they should be at the table. One of the things I’ve noticed when trying to decipher both boys and girls, men and women, is that our expectations of men are completely different than our expectations of women. And so it’s harder to, to fail as a woman. But that doesn’t mean she isn’t underachieving and underperforming and under fulfilling her own life.

So for our males, we continue to look at them to be the breadwinners, the successful ones as far as income or status, power. And for women, we denigrate those qualities, if they have them, as being too manly or pushy. So we [00:50:00] discourage women from being that way and we tend not to acknowledge women who can be that way and want to be that way.

[00:50:09] Candice Price: I think society thinks of gifted women as an abnormality more than something to be celebrated, and, and a rarity. I’ve often said this phrase to friends that the idea of an extraordinary woman is, is, is very interesting to me because I think all women are extraordinary. And so when I think about gifted women, we come in all shapes, sizes. I think that young gifted girls are often missed because the viewpoint of giftedness is an abnormality.

[00:50:39] Nicole Tetreault: A big part of me wanted to own being feminine and, and holding onto that and enjoying what it is to be a woman, and simultaneously using my brain.

[00:50:52] Suki Wessling: We started this episode by invoking the G word. Gifted. It’s an awful word. Loaded with potential for [00:51:00] making people feel bad or making people feel proud or making people feel labeled and separated.

[00:51:05] Lea Stublarec: As gifted parents, we can’t really talk about our children. We can’t brag about them. We can’t commiserate. You know, if you start to whine about something, people will go, your life is a piece of cake.

[00:51:16] Suki Wessling: But like many of those who end up studying giftedness after raising or educating children, Lea found inspiration in learning that after all the struggle, with the right support, gifted women can realize their potential.

[00:51:29] Lea Stublarec: After talking to these women and these daughters, it gave me such hope. They were all so positive. Even the mothers who, some of them, you know, were getting on in years. They were all still doing amazing things, you know, getting PhDs or learning how to fly or, taking this class or that class or traveling or, and I would get off the phone and just feel so energized.

[00:51:52] Suki Wessling: Many gifted women find a way to accept the whole package, their intelligence and their quirks, their passions and their intensities. [00:52:00] Once they can do that, they can move beyond caring about what society expects from them. Here’s Nicole Tetreault.

[00:52:07] Nicole Tetreault: I always felt like I was kind of trapped in a box. Inside, I felt and I knew I was smart and I had a lot of potential. I felt that my test scores never matched that. I felt trapped. I felt a lot of the time people treated me, or it was in my perception, like, oh, she’s you know, a blonde, you know, not too smart. And I felt like I can accept who I was a lot more and feel comfortable with who I was and actually know I’m smart and that my brain really does process things differently.

[00:52:46] Suki Wessling: This whiff of elitism that gets packaged with the G word belies the actual experience of women who are gifted and those who work with the gifted.

[00:52:55] Deborah Ruf: Being gifted is not meaning you’re better. It means you’re [00:53:00] different in this way. We all have differences, and we all have gifts, but that’s different from saying everybody’s exactly the same in what they have to work with. It’s not about being better and it’s not about not living up to your potential because you’re lazy or anything like that. It’s about finding what your strengths are so you can not only personally revel in them yourself and be fulfilled, you can make a difference in the world. And I really believe that’s one of the goals everybody sort of has in them. How can I make a difference?

[00:53:38] Joy Navan: She said, Follow your bliss. And I think that’s what many gifted women do, is they follow their bliss. Yes. And another one talked about, every job that she had, every profession that she entered, she used what she had learned before to take her into the next path. And she called it the drawers. You know, I would open one drawer [00:54:00] and as I finished with that particular project, that drawer got closed and another drawer got opened. It just gets better.

[00:54:08] Joanne Foster: I think if we look at women as a group of, a broad, wonderful, diverse group of individuals who can make change, but not only make it, also ensure that it continues by sharing what it is that they’ve learned along the way.

[00:54:24] Joy Navan: I’m a cancer survivor. I’ve had a an autoimmune disease since I was 35. So physically, maybe it doesn’t get better, but I work to keep it at the same plateau. But what we’re able to do for others, for ourselves, for our community, as you age and the time opens up and the opportunities continue to open for you, it just gets better.

[00:54:50] Suki Wessling: [00:55:00] Thanks to Deborah Ruf, Nicole Tetreault, Lea Sublarec, Candice Price, Joanne Foster, and Joy Navan for taking the time to share their lives and their work with me.

You can find links to all the amazing things that their wonderful intense brains have done on BABBLERY.com.

The song Peaceful Instant is by CyberSDF on Bandcamp.

The song Good Woman’s Blues, performed in 1923 by Rosa Henderson, is courtesy of the National Jukebox.

[00:56:00] Thanks for listening.

 

END
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[00:57:00]

 

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