Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Tuesday, August 22, 2017

"But is she on a trajectory to get a Fields Medal?"

 When we were trying to fill faculty positions in the Ohio State University math department, my colleagues usually put forward the names of male candidates. When women were proposed, they wouldn't make the cut for various reasons, such as that the university where she did her postdoc was less prestigious than that of another candidate, or another applicant published in a more prestigious journal.

After observing this for many years, I proposed an applicant who trumped all other candidates my colleagues had proposed that year, in all categories that my colleagues had stated were important to them.

Speaking against my candidate at the hiring meeting, a colleague asked "But is she on a trajectory to get a Fields Medal?"

My colleagues turned to me for a response. The question took me by surprise. If I said no, that would reduce the chances that she would get a job offer. But if I said yes, they wouldn't believe me. 

Instead, I pointed out that: 
1. the department had never before used such a criterion in our hiring deliberations, 
2. our mission was only to choose the best candidate among the applicants, and this candidate had the best file, 
3. no one who had ever gotten a Fields Medal had ever been a faculty member in the Ohio State math department, 
4. as far as I could tell, no one in the department had been on a trajectory to get a Fields Medal at the time they were hired, 
5. it isn't clear that being "on a trajectory to get a Fields Medal" is a meaningful concept.

Since then, I've seen variations of that line ("but is she on a trajectory to ...?") used against women, but I've never seen such a line used against men.