Boy Math vs. Girl Math: The Internet Sensation Explained

While there is one definitive way to do math, women have suggested that there is an alternative: “Girl Math.” Funny enough, almost every woman on the internet agrees and has used Girl Math a few times in their lives.

Girl Math is an invented set of “rules” that women refer to justify impulse spending. The internet trend features women joking about internal calculations, or feminine logic, to justify their purchases.

The delusional logic behind Girl Math started trending in August when a TikTok video from @samjamessssss went viral, according to KnowYourMeme. In the video, the TikTok user proposes that the discourse would shift from “Girl Dinner” to “Girl Math.”

Similar to what happened to “Girl Dinner,” men felt left out of the joke and wanted to join in on the internet’s biggest and hottest meme. In September, Boy Math caught on with X users, largely thanks to women pointing out the general hypocrisy and nonsensical “rules” men use.

It’s simple. Oftentimes, men will say they are six feet tall when they are 5’10. In a TikTok posted by Ryan Maxwell, where he reacts to Boy Math memes, Boy Math is explained as “being afraid of gold diggers when [men] only have three pairs of socks to [their] name” or “putting on a jersey with a grown man’s name on it every Sunday while mocking the Beyhive,” referring to Beyoncé’s fandom.

The meme became a political punchline quite quickly. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wrote on X: “Boy math is needing 15 attempts to count the votes correctly to become Speaker and then shutting down the government nine months later.”

Boy Math jokes have evolved to tackle a lot of different aspects of men’s logic in the larger culture. One X user posted a Boy Math joke, writing that “Boy Math is waiting until her 18th birthday,” to justify dating someone underage.

Gender-specific jokes are not unknown, but women have taken control of what “female-centric” jokes mean in the culture. Rather than having the joke be on them, women are making jokes about the “feminine urge” to exist in the system that largely ignores them.

The difference between Girl Math and Boy Math is easy to understand if you witnessed the swift death of “Girl Dinner,” a trend that saw women eating snack plates, comfort food, or leftovers as a mean and challenging expectation that women must cook and care for everyone in their household.

Mary Louise Adams, a sociology expert and associate professor of kinesiology and health studies at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, puts Girl Math and Boy Math into perspective for us. “What I read through this trend is that people still do feel like they live in a profoundly gendered world,” she told CNN via email.

From a feminist angle, Louise Adams says that the jokes that rely on the difference between men and women are something that 1970s feminists would have thought we’d be over by now. However, this internet joke shows how much work in gender relationships needs to be done.

While Girl Math is a joke meant to bring people with a shared identity together, Boy Math holds a mirror to the irony that men carry in some of their logic. While this does not apply to everyone, the point of the joke is to make sense to those who need it.