Born: April 26, 1935
Occupation: author, researcher, lecturer, teacher, consultant
Known for: writing Overcoming Math Anxiety; exploring gender issues in education and militarism
Sheila Tobias is a feminist writer, academic, and consultant. She is known for her extensive writing and research about gender issues in education, particularly math and science education.
Background
Sheila Tobias was born in Brooklyn in 1935. She studied history and literature at Radcliffe College (Harvard), where she earned her B.A. in 1957, and later received her master's degree from Columbia. She launched her career exploring feminism and education in New York. In 1982, she moved to Tucson, Arizona, where she still lives.
Cornell and the Beginning of Women's Studies
Sheila Tobias worked as a journalist, including four years as a journalist in Germany, before coming to the world of academia. She was Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Cornell in the late 1960s, a time of budding activism for the campus. Cornell launched its Women's Studies Department, the second in the United States, in 1971.
Sheila Tobias organized the four-day Conference on Women at Cornell in 1969. The Conference on Women featured visiting guest speakers who were prominent feminists, such as Betty Friedan and Kate Millett. Sheila Tobias worked on the conference collectively with other women on campus, few of whom were faculty, most of whom were assistants or in graduate school.
Both the organizing process and the panel discussions helped the organizers realize that higher education was flawed and inherently anti-feminist. They wanted to revamp the curriculum and the ways women were systematically excluded from achieving the same success as men. They taught Cornell's first Women's Studies course in 1970.
Wesleyan, Math, and Science
Sheila Tobias then began working at Wesleyan University, overseeing women students and the hiring of women faculty. In this job, she began to observe math anxiety and the gender differences in math and science education. She wrote Overcoming Math Anxiety, published in 1978, which challenges the assumption that boys are naturally better at math than girls. She argues that the "inability" to do math is actually a psychological block that can be overcome.
Sheila Tobias has also written extensively about science in education. Her books include Breaking the Science Barrier: How to Explore and Understand the Sciences, Revitalizing Undergraduate Science: Why Some Things Work and Most Things Don't, and Science Teaching as a Profession: Why It Isn't, How It Could Be, which examines the shortage of science teachers in the United States.
Other Research
Sheila Tobias has studied militarism and military spending. She co-authored Women, Militarism, & War with Jean Elshtain. The book examines the culture of militarism and argues that "war versus peace" is a false concept if the "peace" is fraught with violence that falls short of warfare. The collection of essays includes an analysis of peace as a women's issue and discusses peace as a part of feminism.
Sheila Tobias is also the author of Faces of Feminism: An Activist's Reflections on the Movement. She is a member of the Board of Directors of the Veteran Feminists of America and the Board of the Association for Women in Science (AWIS).