Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
of someday going to Belgium. Eric stands by impassively while his litany of accomplish-
ments is paraded before me.
“Your son seems pretty calm,” I tell Aileen. “We say he's a cucumber!” she agrees, pre-
sumably in the “cool-as-a” sense, unless this is some Singaporean vegetable metaphor of
which I'm unaware.
“Are you all nervous about the finals?” I ask Aileen.
She shakes her head. “He says, 'Mom, I don't have to be a winner. Winning is a bless-
ing.' “
As I make my way to my seat, I'm stopped by another proud finalist parent, Lorena
Golimlim, whose son Kenji was the four-foot-nothing basketball player I'd watched the
night before. “Kenji! Can you recite the first two hundred digits of pi for Ken?” He does,
with relish.
Apart from Nicholas Farnsworth of Arizona and Kennen Sparks of Utah, all today's fi-
nalists are Asian American, mostly of South Asian descent. This isn't unexpected; Indian
American culture so values this kind of educational success that a nonprofit called the
North South Foundation has organized
an elaborate farm system
for Indian bee nerds,
holding mock spelling bees, geography bees, and math Olympiads through its seventy-odd
chapters nationwide. A more troublesome demographic challenge for National Geograph-
ic is the fact that all ten finalists—and fifty-three of the fifty-five national contestants this
year—areboys.OnlyAlaskaandWyoming,thetwoleastpopulousstatesinthelastcensus,
are represented by girls.
At the picnic, I asked Wyoming's Kirsi Anselmi-Stith about the disparity, which she
chalked up to the social pressures of her age. She shrugged. “The girls are in makeup by
now,” she said. “It's not cool to be a geographer.”
“Is it hard being one of the only girls?”
She grinned. “No, it's more entertaining. When we walk in the room, everyone gets
quiet.”Anathleticseventhgraderwithlongblondhair,Kirsicertainlyseemedtobegetting
her share of attention at the picnic. All night she was orbited by five or six boys a head
shorter than her, a nervous jumble of orthodontia and Adam's apples.
The “map gap” between men and women is, of course, a staple of gender debate in our
culture, the focus of countless unfunny stand-up routines and syndicated columns about
men who refuse to ask for directions or women who can't find the right highway on the
sphere into the laboratories of cognitive psychology, with real scrutiny being given to the
question of whether (and why) women and men navigate and read maps differently.
In 1995, after boys had won six of the first seven geography bees, National Geographic
commissioned two Penn State professors, Lynn Liben and Roger Downs, to study the reas-
ons girls were under-performing. They hoped to find the usual anodyne reasons for a per-
