The ‘Elle Woods’ of Calculus Class

Or how NOT to inspire women into STEM

Reese Witherspoon as “Elle Woods” in the 2001 movie adaptation of Legally Blonde.

First semester freshman year of college, circa the early 2010s, I took Calculus 2. Having passed the AP examination for “Calculus 1” in high school, I thought I would be well prepared for Calculus 2. Except everybody in the class had done the same. So, to make the class more difficult, we were assigned much more challenging problem sets than just “solve this equation”. The class was also graded on a curve, and many students were struggling.

The class had about 60 or 70 students in an auditorium with elevating levels, so the desks in the front row were visible by everyone above them. In every class, sitting front and center, was a woman with long, carefully maintained blonde hair, blue eyes, a carefully coordinated outfit, and makeup. She usually had a Diet Pepsi opened in front of her, and she took diligent notes. I cannot remember the color of her pen/notebook but they may very well have been pink, colors associated with girlishness. Most of us other women wore non-descript clothing and hairstyles, it being enough just to drag ourselves from bed and to class.

One day, another female student commented to this blonde woman that she liked seeing her every day in class—she reminded her of “Elle Woods”, the infamous blonde protagonist of the hit film Legally Blonde. This student clearly felt inspired by this girl’s presence in class.

Recently, I rewatched the film. Elle Woods gets admitted to the prestigious Harvard Law school and struggles to adjust to the norms— how to effectively take notes, prepare for class, navigate the rivalry among students, and deal with creepy and unsupportive professors. After being ridiculed by her study group, she decides to take matters in her own hands and becomes a model student and wins an internship. The worst trial for her of course, is having to wear dark colored clothing, not the bright pink colors she prefers. However, she managed to keep her girlish accessories, do well in class, earn a coveted internship, and use her “feminine” knowledge of hair styling to crack the murder case at the end. Of course, while getting a guy.

So, is Elle Woods THE aspirational role model for women who want to navigate male spaces?

Puffy Pink Feminism

While the movie may not present Elle Wood’s approach as the panacea for women moving into male-dominated professions, it exemplifies one commonly offered approach to retaining women in STEM, or what I might call “Puffy Pink Feminism”. Often, girls’ K-12 outreach can verge into superficial, stereotyped efforts. Many of these interventions are designed to minimize true discussion and acknowledgement of gendered experiences (“gender washing”) and/or resort to superficial interventions grounded in feminine stereotypes (“painting STEM pink”) (Heybach and Pickup 2017). For example, Danica McKeller’s Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail has a cover formatted like a woman’s style magazine (“Are you a math-o-phobe? Take this quiz!”) with cursive script and doodles inside (McKellar 2007). Such efforts can re-enforce heteronormativity while doing little to change institutional inequities.

While I agree that math and science curricula could be improved to better engage and motivate students, these attempts aren’t it.

Notably, strategies for increasing female success in STEM often treat women as a monolith: the heterosexual able-bodied feminine-identifying white woman (Landström 2013). Such strategies also ignore the nuances of race, class, and disability status, and gender identity on experiences and persistence intentions in STEM fields (Cech 2022). Common advice for inspiring women to STEM is to encourage them to select a career path related to their “own experiences” as opposed to making money or pursuing technological achievement. These “experiences” often are related to beauty, fashion, pets, nutrition/food or caregiving (i.e., medical field) (Morgan, Gelbgiser, and Weeden 2013; Hoffmann and Friedman 2022). They also do not equip women to succeed in STEM fields.

These efforts only work to further stereotype and marginalize women in STEM. They can relegate a woman to more subordinate positions in the STEM workforce. Because once a woman gets into the workplace in STEM, she is more likely to be in less prestigious roles and take on more administrative tasks. Even the beauty industry has a poor track record of hiring women in science roles and in upper-level management. These efforts also subtly re-enforce the completely false fearmongering that highly educated women will never find romantic companionship and be lonely childless cat ladies.

Using fashion and beauty (“pink”) as a type of “inspiration” for women in STEM is not very creative. Not all women (like me) enjoy following fashion. It plainly does not interest me and never would have “inspired” me into STEM. Many aspects of “women’s fashion” (jewelry, dresses, leggings, heels, skirts, nail polish, fake nails, untied hair, makeup) are also detrimental to their ability to complete their job, can cause health problems, and are unhygienic and dangerous in laboratory, factory, or medical environments, where many women scientists work. They are also inconvenient when walking or biking across campus in rainy weather. Plus, women are going to be judged anyway, no matter what they wear. You should check out Jessica DeFino’s Substack taking down beauty culture.

Interestingly, Elle Woods keeps being connected to STEM. I found a 2024 Tik Tok video posted by a female mechanical engineering student. In one video, she uses a voice over from Legally Blonde which typified Elle’s sense of displacement and lack of seriousness about law school, when she introduces herself: “Hi I’m Elle Woods, and this is Bruiser Woods and we’re both Gemini vegetarians”. This poster also has many videos related to clothing and doing her hair while studying. Also, last year, in “real life” a mid-30s female faculty member in STEM vehemently defended Legally Blonde as a great movie. Are there so few role models for women in STEM that we are still gravitating to a 20-year-old movie about law school?

A lot of people will claim that women who embrace hyper femininity are “just choosing her choice”. It’s her choice to wear what she likes and do what she wants with her body. Which it is. But often these choices are informed by cultural dictates and are not a true choice. She may be pressured by family, friends, the beauty industry, or a romantic interest to maintain her feminine appearance while moving through a masculine-coded environment. She may fear losing her “individuality” in STEM or her “femininity” without truly interrogating what is her personality, what are her likes and preferences? Often, this is much more than wearing hair curlers or a pink dress. This may be her interest in things like scientific communication, building friendships, art, or music. This is where her inspiration and strength will come from. In fact, Elle Woods’ passion is friendship. She fights and advocates for her friends. That is her personality, not her pink clothes or hair curlers. That is where her confidence and ambition to succeed in law school came from.

A female engineering student quotes Elle Woods from Legally Blonde.

The Need for Genuine Support, Care, and Connection

Moreover, the STEM classroom typically eschews the concept of “community care” and struggles to interrogate the broader implications of “technical achievement” (Riley et al. 2009). For example, in the engineering classroom, there is strong emphasis on design solutions that fulfill consumer need and making profit. There is minimal consideration as to whether a solution would result in layoffs or environmental harm. The engineering curriculum also heavily pushes students towards industrial careers, which work to maintain the gendered, racist divisions of labor. Each of us has to solve the problems, take the tests, alone. Each of us has to bear our own anxiety, alone. Alone, we have to figure out how to succeed, how to get those coveted opportunities and internships like Elle Wood got in the movie. In the movie, Elle Woods was successful in building friendships and support that helped her succeed. Support and community are the keys, not superficial gestures.

Back in Calculus 2, it turns out “Elle Woods” was also really struggling in the class. She decided to switch to an industrial engineering major, which was perceived and perhaps stigmatized by many students as “easier”, since it was focused on logistics in a business environment.

She showed up in Physics the next semester, but then I never saw her again and cannot recall her name, so I do not know if she continued in engineering or not. I do not know how her intellect was perceived or how she was treated in the engineering field.^** However, I wonder if a more supportive classroom environment may have helped. One that focused on learning the concept rather than tricking students may have helped reduce the anxiety, come prelim time. Teaching practices that encouraged community also may have helped decrease the competitive and individual anxiety each one of us carried.

“Puffy Pink Feminism” though is not the solution. What helps is advice on setting boundaries, advocating for yourself, and finding community. Using feminine-coded products, movies, and events to “inspire” women to STEM is patronizing and does not work. Often, women in STEM want to be taken seriously. They also want their interests and their passions to be taken seriously. Rarely, is this “passion” wearing a pink dress in class. They are often much deeper, and more complex.

Final Notes

In the future, I will discuss more about strategies that can help engage everyone in STEM. I will also discuss how other factors, including weed-out courses, grades, academic writing, and climate, can often discourage women from pursing STEM.

There will be more discussion of beauty and fashion and how it pertains to STEM. I will discuss the problems the cosmetic industry has with women scientists; the complexities of Amy Farrah Fowler in The Big Bang Theory; and the time I was negatively compared to Rory Gilmore.

**I did have a conversation with “Elle Woods” on some Jane Austen novels at some point…she didn’t like them incidentally for the required lit class she was taking though I encouraged her to give Persuasion a chance. Many of the STEM folks I met were not interested in literary fiction. I think many struggled to find experiences outside of pop culture that they could relate to. There is definitely the need for more literary fiction that realistically portray STEM experiences. Years later I did eventually meet a nice book club of chemical engineers who read literary fiction.

References

Cech, Erin A. 2022. “The Intersectional Privilege of White Able-Bodied Heterosexual Men in STEM.” Science Advances 8(24): 1–14. https://www.science.org/doi/epdf/10.1126/sciadv.abo1558.

Heybach, Jessica, and Austin Pickup. 2017. “Whose STEM? Disrupting the Gender Crisis Within STEM.” Educational Studies 53(6): 614–27.

Hoffmann, Sarah, and Hershey H. Friedman. 2022. “Machine Learning And Meaningful Careers: Increasing the Number of Women in STEM STEM.” Central and Eastern European Library. https://www.ceeol.com/search/article-detail?id=684900 (June 28, 2022).

Landström, Catharina. 2013. “Queering Feminist Technology Studies.” In Women, Science, and Technology: A Reader in Feminist Science Studies, eds. M. Wyer et al. New York: Taylor & Francis Group., 385–99.

McKellar, Danica. 2007. Math Doesn’t Suck How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind Or Breaking a Nail. Hudson Street Press. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Math_Doesn_t_Suck/z3i3XFhFsuMC?hl=en&gbpv=0.

Morgan, Stephen L., Dafna Gelbgiser, and Kim A. Weeden. 2013. “Feeding the Pipeline: Gender, Occupational Plans, and College Major Selection.” Social Science Research 42: 989–1005. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2013.03.008.

Riley, Donna, Alice L. Pawley, Jessica Tucker, and George D. Catalano. 2009. “Feminisms in Engineering Education : Transformative Possibilities.” NWSA Journal 21(2): 21–40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20628172.