ABSTRACT
A variety of theoretical perspectives has been advanced for addressing the issue of gender imbalance in the teaching and learning of mathematics. For instance, in Kaiser-Messmer and Rogers (1994), four examples are given: The “intervention perspective” which locates the problem in the student; the “segregation perspective” in which the interaction between girls and boys is often the primary focus; the “discipline perspective” in which the nature of mathematics itself is problematized; and the “feminist perspective” in which a critique of the gendered nature of teaching and learning mathematics leads to an examination of the use of power and authority in the mathematics community’ (Ibid., p. 304). For me, this raises some questions. Why did the authors label only one of these four perspectives feminist? Don’t all approaches which seek to address the imbalance correspond to some kind of feminist analysis and practice? Indeed, how does feminism relate to work on women and mathematics?
