Girl math is sitting in a public bathroom stall, looking at your pad that is two-thirds saturated with blood, not having two quarters to buy another one, and wondering if the remaining fraction of pad will be enough to get you through the next three hours without bleeding through your pants. (It won’t.)
Girl math is determining the volume of your breasts as they gradually swell hard as granite five hours into your shift while you’re still waiting for the chance to take your legally mandated pumping break.
Girl math is intentionally limiting the number of ounces you drink, despite the health risks of dehydration, because you have incontinence due to childbirth and you have to be able to leave your house for longer than a couple of hours.
Girl math is calculating how many steps across the parking lot to the bathroom and realizing that you’re not going to make it.
Girl math is counting and recounting the days since your last period, and then counting again. Until you take a test, you are both pregnant and not pregnant. (If Schrodinger had had to worry about becoming pregnant, he would have coined “Schrodinger’s pregnancy” instead of the complicated cat scenario.)
Girl math is counting the number of months without a period or a pregnancy since you stopped taking birth control and realizing something is wrong.
Girl math is coming up with money for full-price procedures for the female parts of your body when your insurance company tells you that they do not cover pregnancy, infertility treatments or even infertility testing because they are not legally required to do so because pregnancy is considered an “elective condition.”
Girl math is subtracting childcare costs from the wages of a job opportunity and realizing that working doesn’t make sense from a numbers perspective.
Girl math is belatedly realizing the economic realities of giving up a promising career decades ago to support your husband’s career, only to have to start over in middle age with no retirement and no marketable skills.
Girl math is rolling the dice when your partner doesn’t want to wear a condom because you don’t feel like you have a choice.
Girl math is wanting more children but feeling like you’re playing Russian roulette with your life, physical health, and mental health if you decide to have another baby.
Girl math is learning that even though something is 97% effective, it still fails 3% of the time. It turns out that 3% odds are much higher than you were led to believe.
Girl math is earning 83% as much as a man.
Girl math is becoming a statistic: globally, 1 in 3 women are physically or sexually assaulted by an intimate partner or sexually assaulted by a non-partner during their lifetimes.
Girl math is weighing the precise moment when “it’s safer to be polite” turns to “it’s safer to scream” and being wrong nearly every time.
Girl math is choosing the bear.
All of these scenarios have happened either to me or to friends of mine. Add your own “girl math” additions in the comments.
Photo by Greg Rosenke on Unsplash
This is tragically sad. And the math is getting worse in so many ways.
Just one way the math is getting worse, soon we are going to have to increase percentage of the risk of death due to pregnancy as states start valuing the worth of an embryo that has most likely already died above the life of the woman carrying that “full rights human being” and let women bleed to death rather than do the necessary medical care to stop the hemorrhaging because it is called “abortion.” In two of my pregnancies, the doctor examined me when I came in bleeding early in pregnancy and said, “go home and stay flat on your back until the bleeding stops and you might save this pregnancy.” In another of my pregnancies, the doctor examined me and said “yes you are pregnant and yes, you are going to miscarry. With the amount of blood, there is no chance this pregnancy will survive.” I didn’t see that much difference in the amount of bleeding, but the doctor could tell, because in all three cases, the doctor was correct. Doctors can often tell if there is a snowballs chance in hell that the pregnancy will survive. They should be allowed to protect the mother’s health in cases where the woman is experiencing a miscarriage. But in the asshole state I live in, they put the woman who is miscarrying on a helicopter and life flight her to the nearest state where abortion is not outlawed until she is on the brink of death abortion is illegal. By the brink of death, when doctors are 100% positive she will die if they don’t do an abortion, it is too late to save the mother’s ability to ever have another child and often too late to save the mother. And doctors just don’t want to risk five years of prison. Helicopters out of state are safer for everybody, expensive as hell, but safer. Women are dying because of abortion being restricted. Women are losing reproductive capacity. Women are having their health permanently damaged all to attempt to save a “baby” that is most likely already dead, and has zero chance of surviving, especially when its mother dies.
And make no mistake, these right wing conservative want to take away all contraception too. They want to go back to the 1800s when women were men’s property and controlled by men. They don’t come out and say that, but it is what they want. There have been right wing politicians already voice that the want to get rid of contraception. There have been RW politicians voice the wish to take away women’s right to vote. Others are wanting to take away no fault divorce, and make no mistake, no fault divorce is how women get out of abusive relationships because it is too hard to prove abuse unless there are witnesses and it is done behind closed doors.
I could keep going with ways republicans want to make girl math worse, but it would take volumes, not a blog post.
Girl Math: Calculating the vector of being able to soothe a screaming child before an impatient male “intervenes”. Can you get the child’s vocal volume down before the point of no return? Can you relocate the child (and sometimes yourself) in time to prevent a verbal altercation?
Girl Science: Calculating the physics of picking up Item A and transporting it to Location B on your way to the bathroom “because” you need uncluttered spaces and you learned “clean as you go” from your YW leader as a pragmatic way to manageably maintain your surroundings instead of being ambushed by “clutter” in one fell swoop 20 years ago. However, the true genius of this equation is that “you can do this all day – practically in your sleep” and your partner cannot – and cannot even see the equation.
“Girl math is choosing the bear.”
Mic drop.
Girl math is calculating how to fit a job, creating a career that should have happened decades ago, and taking care of teenagers into 24 hours because your stuck in a loveless marriage and can’t afford to leave. And deducing that the only reason he hasn’t left either is because you can’t support yourself. Because somehow everyone believed that you being financially dependent your entire life in a wageless career of childcare equaled equality.
Oh, ElleK. This made me cry. I am familiar with too many of these. Thank you for making the invisible visible. ❤️
Girl math is also realizing that you are a 3rd class member of the Church because you have no children.
Girl math is knowing that your standing in the Church is affected by your husband’s activity in the Church…if he leaves, many of the limited opportunities you have also leave.
Gen Xer here. In addition to taking it’s toll on women’s overall mental and sometimes physical health, the rhetoric around women staying home, has affected the socio-economic status of many households and even whole communities. The idea that women should get an education for “just in case” led to many women dropping out before they actually earned a degree or caused their degree to basically become obsolete before they were able to fully use it in the workforce. Often, by the time their children were all in school, women were unable to stay at home because their household needed two incomes to survive. Women had by then lost their opportunity to finish their education and had to fall back on unskilled labor. They were working every bit as hard as their male counterpart, yet they were not bringing home an equal pay, not only because of the gender pay gap, but also because they either didn’t have a degree, or lack of experience, or both.
This rhetoric has led to whole communities being underdeveloped. Often, in rural areas surrounding small towns, there are only two major employers that hired people with college degrees: the hospital and the school district. So why am I bringing this up? It has to do with taxes and education. Towns and cities with a decent tax base are made up of businesses. Guess which businesses don’t get taxed? Hospitals and school districts. Education spending is directly affected by taxation. Therefore, small towns with a low tax base have less money to spend on education. That means that every student is getting shortchanged by this lifestyle. Obviously this affects Utah, but also large portions of Idaho, Wyoming, and Arizona.
I have in a small town all my life. Not that long ago I remember seeing a newspaper help wanted ad that required ANY Bachelor’s degree and then they would train them on the job. That ad ran for months before it was filled. If we want our children to be able to succeed, we need to place more importance on all of them getting a good education and emphasize getting a post secondary education which will allow them to have choices, no matter what their family life looks like after high school.
Girl math is when you, as a single woman, need to budget and buy extra groceries for the casserole/crockpot entree/cake that you’ve been asked/told to bring to the progressive dinner/ward potluck/funeral, knowing you’ll be eating anywhere from zero percent to a fraction of it and that you’ve spent the equivalent of several days worth of meals on it, while the single male ward members will just walk in and load up a plate.
Girl Math also works when you have to “talk to the spouse” about family grocery money allocated on the food for your family’s linger longer contribution and they grumble that “You don’t have to go and socialize, you know” – and you smile and nod while thinking, “You want the social status of us showing up and contributing appropriately AND you want to fuss at me for the resources I need to make that happen?”.
In theory it would never become a competition between what your family needs for the week and what your family needs to survive socially so that your kids have friends in church. And “should this scenario ever come up” – you would know how to resolve the issue without bringing your spouse or asking the RS for support with supplies and all that.
Reality * I have had that conversation as a married woman. I figured out a cheap but well-liked way to contribute (I think it was cookies) that contributed to the sugar over-consumption in the community. And the eldest has walked away from the church because of doctrinal disengagement, unrelated social concerns (that the church community couldn’t have touched with a 10 foot pole even if the culture wanted to), the conversation became moot when I didn’t want to engage with the community with that level of expectation of me [Their loss, and potentially my loss – I agree].
I spent a couple of decades signing up for the clean up committee for every eating event we went to so I would be offered leftovers that I could take home and feed my family for the next few meals – food budget was extremely tight and I had hungry kids!
I once blurted out that the $XX being asked for was more than our food budget for the month – the others on the committee looked at me in disbelief and I had to do a quick mental calculation to make sure I had spoken correctly and I had, so I let the statement stand and the conversation moved on. I surprised myself! I hadn’t actually calculated it before.
I don’t know how I did it, but it worked out in the end – all kids were healthy and well nourished and now are grown and gone and taking care of their own food budgets.
Girl Math is calculating the time it will take to 1) drive your youngest child to daycare and your oldest to elementary school and be on time for work and then 2) pick up both of your children from daycare and get home in time to have dinner on the table for a spouse that expects it to be ready when he gets home.
Girl Math is waiting in a line to go to a public restroom while watching men just walk in and walk out because there are the same number of toilets in each restroom, but it takes women longer. Also in addition to the toilets there are usually both toilets and urinals, increasing the availability of a place for men to relieve themselves.
Girl Math is paying tax on feminine hygiene products while men don’t have to for the blue pill, in fact men either pay nothing or a copay for their blue pills, while women always pay the full price for feminine hygiene products.
Girl Math is noticing that gender designated items that don’t really have to be gender designated (deoderant, razers, etc.) pretty much always cost more for the female version.
Girl Math is living alone on military posts for 3, 6, and 13 months multiple times when your husband is on an unaccompanied tour and being told by him that he is leaving you in the bosom of your family, that is alone with 4 young children living far away from any relatives to lean on, and that his time away, with a maid during 2 of his tours and virtually all his meals prepared for him on all of his tours, is much more challenging than yours will be. After all he is alone (with many soldier friends to hang out with).
If you want to read a book on Girl Math read Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men by Caroline Criado Perez. From Amazon: Data is fundamental to the modern world. From economic development to health care to education and public policy, we rely on numbers to allocate resources and make crucial decisions. But because so much data fails to take into account gender, because it treats men as the default and women as atypical, bias and discrimination are baked into our systems.
And women pay tremendous costs for this insidious bias: in time, in money, and often with their lives.
Celebrated feminist advocate Caroline Criado Perez investigates this shocking root cause of gender inequality in Invisible Women. Examining the home, the workplace, the public square, the doctor’s office, and more, Criado Perez unearths a dangerous pattern in data and its consequences on women’s lives.
Product designers use a “one-size-fits-all” approach to everything from pianos to cell phones to voice recognition software, when in fact this approach is designed to fit men. Cities prioritize men’s needs when designing public transportation, roads, and even snow removal, neglecting to consider women’s safety or unique responsibilities and travel patterns. And in medical research, women have largely been excluded from studies and textbooks, leaving them chronically misunderstood, mistreated, and misdiagnosed.
Built on hundreds of studies in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and around the world, and written with energy, wit, and sparkling intelligence, this is a groundbreaking, highly readable exposé that will change the way you look at the world.