Fear of Math passed from Teachers to (female) students

I have to admit that I am not one to acknowledge fear of math since that is far away from my experience. But there are plenty of websites that discuss math phobia and how to get over it.

example 1, example 2, example 3.

Now in an article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science researchers tested the hypothesis that fear of math is learned from elementary school teachers that have weak math backgrounds and that themselves have a fear of math. What they found is that fear of math seems to be passed onto the female students and not the male students. How this happens is not known.

The experiments were conducted by first measuring math anxiety within both the teachers and the students at the beginning of a school year. By the end of the school year, the more anxious a teacher was about mathematics, the more likely that girls (and not boys!) were to agree with the stereotype that boys are good at math and girls aren't.

One thing I did not know that 90 % of elementary school teachers are women (this is a statistic of U.S. schools, but I believe that it is probably similar for Canada), although I have spent some time in elementary schools here in Toronto and I should have been aware of that.

There are obvious followup questions such as "does fear of math get passed from male teacher to male students?" (which doesn't get addressed because the teachers this study were all female), and "does this only happen at the elementary school level?"

Here is some news coverage of this study:

A very short summary of the results from Chicago Public radio
NPR
Science News
Science Daily

Here is a 2007 story on fear of mathematics:
CBC - Fear over math marks reaches academic proportions