In this “quick bite” episode, seven women talk about their lives as gifted girls and their work helping other gifted girls and women thrive.
Please see ““Women bring something different”: The intense world of gifted women” for show notes and credits.
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, something, you [00:01:00] know, I, my brain learns differently. I learn differently.
[00:01:03] 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.
[00:01:15] Candice Price: There are many wonderfully talented Black women in STEM, still the percentage does not reflect the population at all.
[00:01:23] Lea Stublarec: For many, many years, the, Zeitgeist or whatever it was that bright women were just weird and that they , they called them mental hermaphrodites.
[00:01:31] 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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[00:01:43] Suki Wessling: Can’t you just be someone, something you’re not? I’m your host, Suki Wessling, and today we’re going to use the G word and not apologize for it. That’s
[00:01:55] Deborah Ruf: Gifted
[00:01:56] Nicole Tetreault: gifted woman
[00:01:57] Candice Price: gifted
[00:01:57] Lea Stublarec: gifted girls
[00:01:58] Joy Navan: gifted
[00:01:59] Joanne Foster: [00:02:00] gifted
[00:02:00] Lea Stublarec: gifted daughters
[00:02:00] Joy Navan: gifted women
[00:02:01] 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.
[00:02:08] Joy Navan: 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.
[00:02:31] 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.
[00:02:39] Suki Wessling: Let’s go ahead and open that drawer. Seven gifted women who work with gifted girls and women will share their experiences and observations. And I’ll start because when I’m not hosting the Babblery I’m Professor Suki, teacher of gifted kids.
It’s a profession I fell into after I [00:03:00] 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.
It turned out that giftedness wasn’t at all what I thought it was.
[00:03:16] 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.
[00:03:32] Candice Price: My mom noticed that I was bored in my classes because I was picking things up rather quickly. 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 engage her more.
[00:03:55] Deborah Ruf: I was nearsighted, and it hadn’t been diagnosed yet. I didn’t get [00:04:00] the best grades. But my mother didn’t care about grades. My dad only cared if I was a cute little girl. I ended up being like the teacher’s helper on everything. I helped grade papers. I helped run different offices in the school.
[00:04:16] 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. 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.
[00:04:32] 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.
[00:04:49] Joy Navan: I was very, very fortunate to have a mother who was extremely gifted, although society didn’t recognize that necessarily. Who was a [00:05:00] 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.
[00:05:21] Candice Price: So I think we try to train women and young girls specifically to not show, a giftedness. 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 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 [00:06:00] something than some of your male counterparts and that’s not celebrated.
[00:06:04] Deborah Ruf: 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 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.
[00:06:39] Joy Navan: 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, [00:07:00] that I was a very capable and self 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.
[00:07:21] Candice Price: 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 route and I should ignore it.
[00:07:52] Lea Stublarec: At the preschool level, researchers have found that gifted girls and boys typically don’t differentiate between genders and intelligence [00:08:00] 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.
[00:08:18] Candice Price: At a pretty young age, I watched a lot of like math TV. I watched this great show called Square One which was on PBS. And so my love for mathematics, I think, came from that.
[00:08:32] 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.
[00:08:45] Candice Price: I do think it is much harder for Black girls 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 [00:09:00] 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, 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 picture you there.
[00:09:25] Nicole Tetreault: What we need is we need mentors and teachers and educators and parents to see the potential, 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, that’s really where we to be looking at potentiality, and not limit kids, not limit adults.
[00:09:55] Lea Stublarec: They’re really struggling to do something called feed their lion because these are gifted [00:10:00] 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.
[00:10:08] 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.
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.
[00:10:52] Candice Price: I think society thinks of gifted women as an abnormality more than something to be celebrated, and, and a [00:11:00] 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.
[00:11:14] Nicole Tetreault: 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.
[00:11:38] Deborah Ruf: Being gifted is not meaning you’re better. It means you’re 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.
[00:11:54] Joanne Foster: I think if we look at women as a group of, a broad, wonderful, diverse [00:12:00] 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.
[00:12:09] Joy Navan: 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.
[00:12:23] Suki Wessling: 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.
The song Peaceful Instant is by CyberSDF on Bandcamp.
The song Good Woman’s Blues, performed in 1923 by Rosa Henderson, is courtesy [00:13:00] of the National Jukebox.
I’m
Suki Wessling and this has been a Minibabble.
Find the full episode and show notes at the Babblery, that’s B A B B L E R Y.com. Thanks for listening.
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