The Marriage Files

Welcome to the first of many TMFs devoted to debunking widespread stereotypes about women. I’m calling this series-within-a-series The Real Deal.

It’s a misconception that women can’t do math. I, for example, had several years of higher mathematics in college, including advanced calculus and linear algebra. To this day, I read books about math for the sheer pleasure of it. And although my husband K— has many, many talents, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t know a quadratic equation from a quintuplet.

But reality and myth are two different things, and the erroneous belief that women “aren’t good at math” is epidemic. Its origin really isn’t that hard to understand. Let me show you by example. Say a man and a woman (we’ll call them Bill and Jill) are both looking for a new car. They both go into the same showroom and talk to the same salesman (we’ll call him Jack) about purchasing the very same car. A woman, being a rational creature, would assume that Jack would come up with a price by adding up all the costs plus a reasonable profit and getting a total, and that she and Bill would come away with the same quote. But she’d be wrong. She would be quoted a much higher price.

Furthermore, let’s say Jill and Bill happen to bump into one another at the showroom. They’re old friends, so she asks him out for a drink and they end up comparing prices. She finds out that he was quoted a lower price and returns to the showroom to find out why. Jack’s response is that when he gave out the original quotes, he must have made a mistake. Then he’d retabulate all the figures and quote Jill a second price even higher than the first.

You see, the reason women think they aren’t good at math is this: innumerable times in a woman’s life, she’ll encounter Male Math, a phenomenon whereby 2+2=4 only sometimes, namely, when a man is the customer. When a woman is the customer, 2+2 can equal whatever a male salesman wants it to equal based on his immediate financial needs. Needless to say, this is a type of math into which only men are initiated. When a man calculates according to Male Math and a woman doesn’t follow, he calls her “bad at math,” and eventually, she believes it.

The big question is this: exactly when and where are men taught Male Math? It’s certainly not in elementary school classrooms! I wondered about this for a long time before hitting on what I’m sure is the answer: all those crazy fraternal organizations with the weird names, cryptic logos, secret handshakes and lodges in bad parts of town. Where better to engage in secret activities designed to give men an advantage over women than in a club whose membership is male only? And here we women thought the Shriners were just wearing silly hats, building go-karts and funding children’s hospitals. No! The philanthropy is just a front for their real work: coming up with whole new fields of Male Math inquiry, such as telephone service pricing schemes and Reaganomics.

Taken to its logical extreme, Male Math explains a lot of things. For instance, what happens when a bunch of guys, largely unsupervised, forget that Male Math isn’t real math, and start using it all the time, with bigger and bigger sums of money? Enron accounting, that’s what!

And it’s not just in financial transactions that women will encounter Male Math. To find other examples, just think of a field dominated by men, and you can bet Male Male will be rampant. Construction, for instance. Reason suggests that a 2x4 should measure 2 inches by 4 inches, right? But no, its actual dimensions are 1-1/2 inches by 3-1/2 inches. And what about electrical wire? The greater its gauge, the thinner it is. That’s because in Male Math, larger doesn’t necessarily mean bigger; it can also mean smaller. Ask men about these things, and you’ll just get that condescending look that says, “Don’t strain your brain, little lady. Just leave it up to us guys. We understand math.”

There’s plenty of funny arithmetic to contend with at home, too. For instance, women everywhere know that when their husbands estimate how long it will take to complete a household project—anything from vacuuming the floor to putting an addition on the house—it always takes longer than they say it will. Much, much longer. I began to wonder if some sort of mathematical principle wasn’t involved, such as a constant or an algorithm. Using my own experience with my husband K—, I performed some calculations and, lo and behold, I found that there is! I call my discovery the Coefficient of Completion, and I’ve assigned it the designation C.

C is simply the number by which you must multiply your husband’s guesstimate of how long it will take to complete a job—any job—to get an idea of when it will actually happen. To calculate your husband’s C, simply get him to agree to perform a task and ask him how long it will take. Measure the actual elapsed time until the job is done, then divide that by his estimated time to get his C.

It should be obvious that every man will have a unique C. So, while K— has a C of 7.8, another man can have a C of 6.5 while a third can have a C of 200. Theoretically, a C of infinity is possible, and my work to date points strongly toward a lower limit of 5.0 for the C function.

This is a very powerful mathematical tool for women. Now I know that if K— says he’ll clean the bathroom on Tuesday, I can expect it to be done a week from Wednesday. And this is why K—‘s basement remodeling project has been going on for over 2 years. Using his C and plugging in K—‘s original estimate, I see that the earliest possible date by which it could ever have been finished is next April. Had I realized that from the start, I never would have fretted over how long it was taking.

The existence of Male Math is incontrovertible. The real question for women is what to do about it. My Coefficient of Completion should help ease marital friction for tens of thousands of women just by relieving them of unrealistic expectations. Outside the home, I’d suggest more adversarial tactics. It seems to me that when you want to make a point, you should hit your opponent where it hurts, and here’s where one of those oddball traits that most men share can work to your advantage. Have you ever noticed that a vast majority of men have an aversion to coin money? It’s as if they just don’t get the idea of a fraction of a dollar. K— is no exception. He sheds spare change like our pets shed fur; it’s everywhere he’s been. So, the next time you suspect a man is charging you a Male Math price, just say, “That’ll be fine. You don’t mind if I pay in Susan B. Anthony dollars, do you?” Then hoist your sack of coins onto the table and begin counting. My bet is that your salesman will suddenly remember that today is Ladies Discount Day.

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