Little boys want to be doctors, athletes, and teachers. Little girls also want to be doctors, athletes and teachers. A recent study by the British charitable initiative Born to Care found that there is actually no difference in career aspirations between genders for children between two and 12 years old.Children's top five careers for both genders were precisely the same: teacher, doctor, athlete, policeman and dancer. So why is it when we fast-forward to college, things change radically? 

Today, we do not have equal representations of gender in any of those five careers. Men dominate medicine, athletics and law. Women dance and teach more than their male counterparts. Gender inequality in the workforce is a national epidemic, especially in science. The National Center for Education Statistics reports that only 20 percent of bachelor's degrees in physics are conferred on women. This painfully real statistic is a wake-up call, smashing the beautiful idealism of childhood dreams. Women and men, who start out with the same na??ve hopes, end up with dramatically different realities. Somewhere along the way, there is a force that drives this differentiation. 

I will not pretend to say there is any one reason why women are underrepresented in the sciences. One of the most thought-provoking of these perspectives is the recent study by Harvard University economics Professor Claudia Goldin. She found that in an Introduction to Economics class, women who received B's in the subject were 50 percent less likely than their male counterparts to major in it. This is complicated. One could argue that maybe the women weren't that interested in majoring in economics to begin with, or that their B was just a realization that economics doesn't make them happy. 

All of this could be true, but what makes any sort of explanation of this phenomenon tricky is that similar trends were not seen in the men. In fact, the percentage of men choosing to major in economics was between 30 to 40 percent, no matter the grade. By the time grades less than a B- were reached for women, however, only five percent of them chose to major in economics. 

Why women behave like this, I think, could be a repercussion of the cult of perfection. In our cultural moment, women not only want to be perfect, they are expected to be perfect. Magazines and advertisements describe women as having the perfect hair, the perfect family, the perfect life. We are bombarded with images of these so-called perfect women, and actresses like Katherine Hiegl have made many a romantic comedy about nearly perfect women. When women fail to be perfect in the media, they are portrayed as unhappy and unloved, otherwise pitiful creatures. Male characters, however, do not face these crippling repercussions of falling short of society's expectations. Of course, men face their own set of societal pressures, but these pressures don't seem to be deterring them from natural science. 

Part of this media pressure stems from the fact that women are still largely judged on their accomplishments and extrinsic qualities. In the book Cinderella Ate My Daughter, author Peggy Orenstein explores positive reinforcement parents used on their children. Orenstein found that often parents told their sons they're "smart" while calling their daughters "pretty."
Little boys are told that they are intrinsically valuable; little girls are told that they are merely valuable for their appearances. 

If women are told from an early age that their self-worth is based on their external self, they will continue to believe this for the rest of their lives, according to a study done at King's College London. This explains why women are more prone to eating disorders or plastic surgery. Men only make up 10 percent of the total population with eating disorders, and only 20 percent of cosmetic plastic surgeries. Appearances, however, can also mean giving off the impression of having a picture-perfect career or family. Failing to give off the outward impression of perfection-in any aspect-means a failure to validate a sense of self-worth. When women capitulate to this cult of perfection, they perpetuate it. Mothers, friends and sisters seem to have the perfect life, and encourage other women to have it as well. Through a sort of toxic syllogism, most of the social pressure to be perfect falls mostly on women. 

In the context of Goldin's study, this could mean that women are less likely to major in subjects in which they receive average grades because a B would mean that they are failing to be perfect. The unfortunate thing about this is that science will never be perfect. In physics, you will fail more often than not. Physics is built on concepts that make little intuitive sense, like thermodynamics, and even more obtuse math invented to describe physical phenomena. Post-educational physics is even worse, as modern physics research involves answering nearly impossible questions, such as reconciling quantum mechanics and general relativity. Even Albert Einstein failed; his doctoral thesis was rejected long before he ever brushed the surface of his theory of relativity. Regularly, in the natural sciences and math, the highest grade on a midterm will be a C-plus, leaving most of the students in a murky D territory. It is miserable and unabashed, and your GPA may not persevere. 

For perfectionist women, this imperfection is a constant reminder that they are falling short of their lofty goals. The relationship between grades and choosing a major is a powerful way to explain why four times the number of men receive physics degrees than women. According to a Feb. 4 article in the Justice, inflation is not as rampant in the sciences as it is in the humanities during the underclassmen years. Understandably then, it is easy to see why a hopeful science major who got a C in her chemistry class would look around her, hear about her friend's perfect 4.0 GPA, and wonder if she is making the right life choices. 

So women lick their wounds, salvage their GPAs, and find another subject in which they can excel. They leave science in the dust. Contorting a world to achieve perfectionism, however, only hurts women in the end. Psychologists classify perfectionism as a neurotic disorder. Succumbing to the cult of perfectionism can lead to low self-esteem, anxiety and depression, according to a seminal study by D.E. Hamachek. 

Women need to allow themselves to let go of the unattainable standards that they set for themselves. Failure is never as catastrophic as perfectionists pretend it to be, and being able to come to terms with this is an important step our society needs to take. Maybe women will still realize that they would rather be an English major or a sociology Ph.D. We shouldn't force anyone to be a scientist--we desperately need artists and poets in this world. But maybe if women do let go of their inhibitions, they will come to recognize the beauty in partial derivatives or the elegance of attaining a long-awaited experimental result, and can find happiness, like their male peers, in science.