The vent for the men's room

When I was hired as an Assistant Professor at Ohio State, I was assigned one of the very few faculty offices that had no windows. It was an interior office next to a men's room.

That it was next to the men's room was evident every time someone flushed, since the sound entered my office via a hole in the wall, of pipe-sized diameter, that seemed to amplify the noise. If I were on the phone, I had to ask the person at the other end to wait for the flushing sounds to subside, before we could resume our conversation.

Luckily, the hole didn't go straight from my office to the men's room, giving an interesting, if unsettling, view of my colleagues; the hole turned a corner, blocking light but not sound.

Presumably the hole served to vent the men's room ... into my office.

When the department decided to enter a more modern era and wire the offices for ethernet, I learned that my office would be the hub where all the wires would meet. I learned this when I arrived one day and found bootprints on the research papers I had laid out on my desk, and a hole in the ceiling above my desk. I cleared the fallen plaster off the desk, tried unsuccessfully to clean the bootprinted papers, and resolved to put away each evening anything I wanted to see again.

One day, as I worked in my office with the door half open (hoping to ventilate at least some of the men's room fumes into the hallway), a committee walked in without saying hello or acknowledging my presence. The committee chair picked up a piece of chalk and began to write on my blackboard, as he loudly explained to his committee the problem they were trying to solve. This must have been the department's computer committee, planning the wiring design.

I didn't know whether they didn't realize I was there, or didn't care. Since my door was open, it should have been clear that the office was occupied. It was a small rectangular room, and I sat facing the door, near the middle of the room. I was hard to miss.

It wasn't easy to concentrate on my work while a committee met in my office. I wondered what to do.

I cheerily said "Hello", but no one responded. 

I loudly closed and opened the books I was using, in the hope that they'd notice that I was there, it was my office, and I was trying to work.

Eventually, I decided to be helpful. If they were going to have a committee meeting in my office while I was there, I should at least be a temporary honorary committee member, shouldn't I? I helpfully chimed in with a suggestion for solving the wiring problem.

The committee turned and looked at me, in horror. The committee chair glared. He made clear his displeasure. Not with my solution, but with my unwelcome interruption.

I shut up and continued to observe them in amusement, amazed that they considered this a reasonable way to treat a colleague.

Perhaps I could have gotten rid of them faster by pointing out that they'd be healthier continuing their conversation somewhere that wasn't the vent for the men's room.

Outtake #4: Life and Death

The final outtake from my September 16 piece. I can see why the editors felt that these might not be a good fit for a book intended to "give students a place to turn when they need inspiration, motivation, and encouragement."

The physicians at Princeton University's health center were quite capable of correctly diagnosing medical conditions when the patient was male, but had more trouble when the patient was female. On more than one occasion they told female students that women can't cope with the stress of Princeton's high workload (never mind that I hadn't had a problem with a higher workload at Harvard), and sent them home without the correct diagnosis or treatment. An undergraduate died after being sent home in such a way. Having survived Princeton, I feel as if I can survive anything.

Outtake #3: Survival

A third outtake from my September 16 piece:

Some things that helped me survive as a mathematician were:

I was oblivious to the sexism for a long time. (Unfortunately, once you learn what it looks like, it's hard to unlearn.) In particular, it took me a long time to figure out how many colleagues viewed me as part of their personal lives and not their professional lives.

I also learned to document things and save evidence. Don't count on being believed; have proof.

Outtake #2: Gender ratio for students at the University of Cambridge and at Churchill College

Another outtake from my September 16 piece:

At Cambridge, gender parity for undergraduates did not happen until 2005. 

A predominately science and technology College, the percentage of Churchill College undergrads who were female was 30% in the 1970s and also now, and 20% in the 1980s. My 1980 photo of "Advanced Students" has a 4 to 1 ratio.

Outtake #1: When something goes wrong

My next few posts will be "outtakes" from earlier drafts of my September 16, 2018 piece. See especially my commentary under the following outtake.

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There are things I should learn to do better. One is to choose my battles, or at least figure out sooner when the battle is lost. If you look up the management chain and see no one who can be counted on to do the right thing, then your only options might be the unpalatable ones of getting a lawyer, going to the media, or getting out. When the stress of unfair treatment makes you ill, it's probably time to get out. Your health is your highest priority.

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The above was intended as advice for students. But I've told a variant of this advice to administrators (who would rather that I hadn't), and it's especially important for them. To administrators and managers (in all professions), the message is:

People need to know where to go to get problems fixed. If the problem is more likely to be solved by going to a lawyer or the media than by any option you offer, then some people will do so. If you don't want that, you need to provide better options, that can be trusted to make things better rather than worse.

Moving beyond affirmative action for men

I was invited to submit a story for the book "The Struggle is Real: Stories of Struggle and Resilience on the Path to Becoming a Mathematician", edited by Allison Henrich, Emille Lawrence, Matthew A. Pons, and David Taylor, to be published by the MAA (May 2019 update: the title has been changed to "Living Proof: Stories of Resilience Along the Mathematical Journey"). According to the editors, "The goal of "The Struggle is Real" project is to talk openly about the struggles we have faced on the road to becoming a mathematician. ... the goal is to talk about it, to share personal stories, and start to break down the walls that have grown between people in our discipline. ... We believe that a resource like this will be valuable to our community in a variety of ways. First, it will give students a place to turn when they need inspiration, motivation, and encouragement. Second, it will remind those of us who are professional mathematicians to remember the times when we struggled and have compassion for our students who might be facing similar obstacles. In addition, it will help to dispel myths about who can and who cannot succeed in our field."

Below is the version that will appear in the book, i.e., the upbeat version. The editors asked me to remove from my early drafts the more pessimistic parts, and say more about things that helped me to survive. I plan to eventually post here some of the "outtakes".

 I joke that all of my higher education was at single sex universities ... but unfortunately for a sex of which I'm not a member. The disparities between the way men and women were treated at those universities ranged from serious to laughable.

I grew up going to New York City public schools when they were unsafe and the city was verging on bankruptcy. Neither of my parents graduated from college, so my siblings and I had to learn for ourselves how to cope with the Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges.

Harvard College didn't admit women to the Class of 1979 (even though that's the college I went to). The female students were all admitted by Radcliffe College. The Harvard/Radcliffe ratio at that time was 2.5 to 1 by fiat, having gotten there gradually from a ratio fixed at 4 to 1 a few years earlier. People have told me that affirmative action must have helped me get into Harvard. They don't realize that Harvard's affirmative action favored men and not women; discrimination against women was institutionalized.

Our value was conveyed to us in trivial ways before we even started. With the acceptance letter, Harvard sent the boys a postage paid envelope for their response, and a fancy certificate suitable for framing stating that they got into Harvard. The girls needed to put stamps on their response envelopes. While Princeton alumni joke that Princeton's Latin motto translates to "God went to Princeton", I joke that Radcliffe's Latin motto translates to "Radcliffe has no money".

The female students were known as "Radcliffe bitches". Some professors made it clear that they expected the men to go on to top grad schools, while they expected the women to teach high school.

Harvard declared itself coeducational in 1999 (sic), but its 360-year legacy has a lingering impact, for example in faculty gender ratios. There were no female tenured mathematics Professors in the Harvard, Cambridge, or Princeton math departments when I was a student there, or any time before. Neither Harvard nor Cambridge had any in the 20th century, and Princeton's first was in 1994.

Churchill College prides itself on being "the first of the formerly all-male Cambridge colleges to vote to admit women". It is less proud that it was the last Cambridge College to be founded as men-only (contrary to Sir Winston's wishes). Churchill College first admitted female undergraduates in 1972. The Master while I studied there in 1979-80 had voted against admitting women.

That women weren't welcome at Princeton, which went coed less than a decade before I applied to grad school, was signaled in ways ranging from blatant to subtle. A group calling itself the "Concerned Alumni of Princeton" agitated to revoke coeducation. The ratio of men's rooms to women's rooms in the math building was 3.5 to 1. Some time after I graduated, someone who has been an AMS President told me that the reason there were no female students when he went to Princeton was that none were good enough to be admitted; he wasn't aware that women were barred.

I learned many things from my experiences. I learned that decisions that should be based on merit and fairness are often (subconsciously) instead based on empathy. This unfortunately leads to people favoring people who remind them of themselves, and people finding it hard to believe that those isomorphic to themselves can do bad things.

Something that helped me survive as a mathematician was that I'd rather listen than talk. Putting yourself in someone else's shoes is a useful game. Sitting around after dinner with other students (i.e., procrastinating instead of studying), we tried to figure out why we disagreed on something that seemed obvious to each of us. We could usually trace our differences to our own experiences or our family's values (and our acceptance or rejection of them). This helped us to see that there can be more than one valid viewpoint. One learns more by listening than by speaking.

I try to have a sense of humor and to be bemused rather than angry or resentful (though I don't necessarily succeed at that), and I try to remember what's important and not get stressed about things that aren't. I try to view the world with a sense of adventure and an appreciation for the absurd. (It helps that I haven't yet figured out that I'm not Alice in Wonderland.) Mathematicians (and people in general?) are a lot like children, with both the good and the bad that accompanies that. I'm eternally optimistic that, like children, they (we) have the capacity to learn and become better.

The mathematical community is a lot like a family. It's a collection of people, some difficult, some complicated, but to a large extent we care about each other.

References:

Mark Goldie, "Going Co-ed: How Churchill College became the first men's College to decide to admit women", July 2, 2017 lecture, Churchill College, University of Cambridge, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrpfizW_rMU 

Nancy Weiss Malkiel, "Keep the Damned Women Out": The Struggle for Coeducation, Princeton University Press, 2016.

"Alice, what are you doing next year?"

During my last semester at Harvard, I ran into Professor Q on the stairs leading to the math department Common Room. He animatedly asked, "Alice, what are you doing next year?"

I replied, "I got into MIT, Chicago, and Berkeley. Princeton makes its decisions next week. If I get into Princeton, I'll go there."

Q's face turned beet red. "You mean ... you're going to grad school?! ... In mathematics?!"

"Yes."

Not only had I done well in the courses I took from Q, but I had done well in general (I had already been named one of the few students to get junior year Phi Beta Kappa, and would soon graduate summa cum laude in mathematics). Had I been male, no one would have been surprised that I planned to go to grad school. In mathematics.

Q had clearly been planning to tell me something, but now thought better of it.

I asked, "What were you going to say?"

"Oh, nothing. It doesn't matter." He looked very embarrassed.

Curious, I insisted. "Please. You were going to say something. What was it?"

Hesitatingly, he told me that a math teacher at his son's high school had recently left. Q had thought that I might not have plans for next year, and would be interested in the position.

I deduced from Q's embarrassment that he would not have had this conversation with a comparable male student. But it's nice to know that he realized he should be embarrassed!

Immunizations

"I don't have a sexist bone in my body. I would never do or say anything sexist. I'm the least sexist person there is," said F, shortly before saying things that seemed rather sexist to me.

I looked at him quizzically. Did he think I was stupid, and that I'd believe that nothing he said could be sexist, just because he said so?

I tried to figure it out. After observing him and others, it seemed to me that he believed he was immunizing himself against accusations of sexism. If I charged him with sexism, I'd be implicitly accusing him of lying. He thought I'd be reluctant to do that.

It's not just men who try to immunize themselves. Many people recognize that when someone tells a woman, in a professional setting and in front of her colleagues, how lovely she looks, while praising men for their work, this can undermine her professional stature in the workplace. But some women readily compliment other women on their clothes, in front of their colleagues. Sometimes they accompany it with "This would be sexist if a man said it, but it's fine since I'm a woman." If it's not OK when a man does it, why is it OK when a woman does it? In my book, saying it's OK doesn't immunize their actions from scrutiny.

And when someone begins a sentence with "I know this might sound racist (or sexist), but …", that self-awareness doesn't necessarily make it less racist or sexist.

In job ads, say what you mean and mean what you say

 Every so often I receive an email message or phone call, sometimes from a friend, sometimes from someone I don't know, saying that his or her department has a job, here's what they're looking for, and can I spread the word and help them find someone who fits the bill?

If I wasn't sent the job ad, I look it up. Usually, the criteria that I was told are very different from those in the job ad.

I point out the discrepancy between the official ad and what they told me, and suggest that their job ads state the criteria they're really looking for. I also suggest that they advertise widely, and not just spread the word via the "old boy network" (even if it includes me). Put together a diverse hiring committee. Interview the people whose files best satisfy the criteria in the job ad.

They usually seem surprised by my advice.

postscript to July 25 post

My July 25 post reminded me of a story I heard in 1979 from a postgraduate student at the University of Cambridge. The dorm rooms and common areas were cleaned by female "bedders" hired by the College. When some of the all-male Colleges went mixed (coed) in the 1970s, some of the bedders at first refused to clean the rooms of the female students. These bedders viewed the male students as better than them. But they said that the female students were just like them, and they were offended at the idea of having to clean for women — women could clean for themselves.

A mountain of unwashed coffee cups

 I visited a mathematics research institute in Bonn, Germany sometime in the 1990s. In addition to offices, each floor had a small kitchen with ceramic coffee cups, coffee-making equipment, and a prominent sign stating that everyone was responsible for washing their cups after use. So I was surprised to find a mountain of unwashed coffee cups piled in the sink.

The mountain grew higher each day, and eventually teetered precariously. I was afraid to go near it, lest my breathing set off a cup avalanche and topple them onto the floor.

I asked around, and learned that the culprit was one person.

One day, I saw the culprit in the kitchen, adding to his monument. I pointed out the sign about washing one's own cups, and said I was curious as to why he didn't.

He politely explained that he was from Poland, where (he claimed that) washing dishes was women's work. He said that he expected the female staff or the female mathematicians to wash his cups.

Since I hadn't yet spent any time in a Buddhist monastery, I most likely gave a response that isn't printable.

My Brilliant Friend

Elena Ferrante's book "My Brilliant Friend" led me to recall my brilliant childhood friend Lila (not her real name). Lila was the best student in our year in elementary school, and got the top grades. She could have done anything she set her mind to, and done it brilliantly.

Lila and I planned to become great authors someday. I was a fan of Edgar Allan Poe, so Lila made up a hilarious mock newspaper article announcing the granting of an Edgar Award for my (non-existent) future first novel.

Her family was among the poorer ones. Our part of Queens had large areas consisting of "garden apartments" — small apartments in two-story brick buildings. I never saw one with a garden. Lila's brother slept in a narrow alcove in the hallway in their garden apartment. The family worried about what to do when he outgrew the length of the alcove and wouldn't fit anymore.

In New York City, kids with high enough grades who were born early enough in the year could skip from second to fourth grade. My mother ran into Lila's mother one day. Lila's mother told mine that the school decided not to let Lila skip a grade. The reason was that Lila had once cried when she didn't score 100 on a test. The school decided that this was a sign of immaturity — girls shouldn't take their grades so seriously.

Around the end of fourth grade, Lila told me that from her observations of our world, she had learned that girls and women are rewarded for being popular, and punished for being smart, so she decided that from then on she would be popular instead of smart.

I knew I would never be smart enough to figure out how to be popular, so Lila had no competition from me in that arena. I was silently glad that I would at last have a chance to be the kid with the highest grades.

It didn't happen in fifth grade — it wasn't easy for Lila to relinquish the top spot and get less than a perfect grade. She had to make a real effort. But she could do anything she was determined to do, and by the time she graduated elementary school she succeeded in being a popular kid rather than the "smartest" one.

We saw little of each other in high school. We weren't in the same classes. Every so often I'd learn of something wonderful that Lila did, in areas like music or drama. It confirmed to me that she really could do whatever she wanted.

Lila and I occasionally saw each other on the Q44A bus that we took home from high school; we both got off at the last stop, and then walked home in opposite directions. One afternoon in our senior year, toward the end of the line, when the bus had nearly emptied out, we got to talking about what we planned to do with our lives. Lila told me matter-of-factly that she intended to be a hooker. Not your run-of-the-mill prostitute, but an expensive, exclusive, high-class call girl who catered to the wealthiest businessmen and the most important politicians. Her observations about how the world worked told her that this was the best plan for how a woman could make enough money to live well, and retire early and comfortably.

I didn't know whether to believe her. She might have been serious. Or she might have been amusing herself by trying to shock me. I decided to play it cool and pretend I wasn't shocked.

Years later I was pleased to learn, indirectly, that she had a law degree and was working as a prosecutor in New York. I realized that she had just been trying to shock me.

But when Governor Eliot Spitzer (a former New York prosecutor) resigned after liaisons with high-priced call girls, I did contemplate writing a screenplay about a New York prosecutor moonlighting as a madam who ran an exclusive prostitution ring and procured call girls for her colleagues (and I'm embarrassed to admit that I was slightly disappointed that Lila's name never appeared in the articles about the escort service used by Spitzer).

Math, not people

 W asked me to join him and several others on the organizing committee for a research program to take place at a mathematics institute. The pre-proposal, which W and another organizer had already written, was due in a couple of days. My guess is that I was added to the committee at the last minute as its "token woman".

Our proposal was eventually accepted, and it was then our task to choose mathematicians to invite to the program.

I decided that, of the possible reasons to have a "token woman", a positive one was to have someone on the committee reminding us not to overlook mathematicians from traditionally-overlooked demographics who would be a good fit for our program. I decided to take my role as token woman seriously.

But as we tossed around names of people to invite, almost all were male. Mostly co-authors, students, advisors, or friends of my co-organizers and their friends. I was something of an outsider on the committee, since my fields of mathematics were further from our program's field than were those of my co-organizers. So I had more trouble thinking of invitees. I decided to search for ideas using the online database of mathematics publications. But since I was inputting the names of my co-organizers, it output their co-authors, students, etc.

I despaired of finding a way to broaden the demographics of our invitees. Perhaps this was just a field with no women.

I reread our proposal. It was in the form "Our program will study the ramifications of B's paper, on which interesting work has already been done by C, D, and E. We will also explore ways to solve the conjectures of F and G." This confirmed my sense that this field consisted of B through G and their entourages. I was resigned to leave it at that.

As the outsider, I felt insecure about my role in the program. I wondered, "If people ask what the program is about, can I even tell them? I can say the point is to build on the work of B, C, D, E, F, and G. But what if they ask what that means?"

I said to the committee, "Our proposal focuses on the people. But what if we instead focus on the mathematics? What are the mathematical problems we'd like to solve? Rather than saying "the work of B", can we identify the mathematical topics and questions we want to pursue?"

At first, it wasn't easy to rephrase the proposal in terms of the mathematics. But we did. And once we did, we had keywords we could feed into the database. And out popped new names we hadn't thought of. Some were good choices for our invitee list, including some women.

People are interesting. But there are drawbacks to overemphasizing people in place of ideas. Personally, I'd rather that we not name buildings after people. And I'm not a fan of a recent emphasis on people and personalities, rather than mathematics, in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Who decides whom to spotlight, and what criteria do they use? This can be problematic.

"You must be mistaken!"

 When I told American colleagues about a certain result, and mentioned that I had proved (and published) it, the knee-jerk reaction was "Oh, that's obvious." I grew accustomed to that response.

That's why I was surprised when the result came up in a conversation with Lucien Szpiro and he said something like "That's a nice result! Who proved it?" 

I was even more surprised that he still liked the result, even after I told him that I'd proved it.

My impulse was to exclaim "No, no! You must be mistaken! The result is obvious! I'm not a real mathematician!" Fortunately, I restrained myself.

My trips to France in the 1980s and 1990s were refreshing. It seemed to me that female mathematicians (and not just foreign ones) were treated seriously, like real mathematicians.

Afterword:

I ran a draft of this story past a friend, who advised me to remove the line "I'm not a real mathematician!" since he thought it didn't make sense. I told my friend "But this is what I actually thought. I don't want to remove it." He said that if I leave it in, I need to explain it.

Even though I don't like to include too many consecutive "whiny" posts that might look as if I'm complaining about things that happened to me, I wrote the June 16 and 23 posts to explain this one.

My knee-jerk reaction "You must be mistaken! The result is obvious! I'm not a real mathematician!" followed many incidents, over many years, of being treated as if I'm not a "real mathematician" like my colleagues.

"Foreigners are golden"

When an Australian biologist told me "foreigners are golden", she opened my eyes to something that would have taken me a long time to figure out on my own. She said that in America, in her professional life she was not only treated better than in Australia, but also better than her American female colleagues.

Her explanation was that men identify women from their own country with their sisters, wives, mothers, or daughters. But a foreign woman is exotic. Almost a different species. She's special.

I began to pay attention. I noticed that in Japan I was treated better than Japanese female mathematicians, in Germany I was treated better than German female mathematicians (though not as well as I was treated in the U.S.), etc. In other countries, I was golden. Not normal, not "one of us", but assigned a higher status than the local women.

Photocopying exams

 This blog post is part of a series designed to give some of the backstory for an upcoming post.

When I arrived at the cavernous room in the basement to photocopy my final exams, someone was using all the machines. She told me she'd be using them for a few hours. She was the administrative assistant for a professor in the physics department.

We started chatting, and I mentioned that I was in the math department. She said that the last time she was in the photocopy room, she was shocked to find a young assistant professor of mathematics copying his own exams. "That's not right," she said.

I replied, "In the math department, even very senior faculty, such as myself, have to photocopy our own exams." From what she said next, it was clear that she (still) thought I was a secretary, copying someone else's exams. I tried a few more times with no success, and eventually I gave up trying to convince her that I was faculty.

"Alice, Professor X is here in my office."

"Alice, Professor X is here in my office. He doesn't like the room he's teaching in, and wants to trade classrooms with you," said N, the department manager, over the phone.

Professor X felt that the blackboard mechanism and the platform at the front of his classroom were dangerous, and he wanted a safer classroom. I agreed to trade rooms.

This was soon after I arrived at UCI as a senior professor. Since N had known Professor X longer, and he was at a lower rank in the hierarchy than I was, I didn't understand why N used his last name and title, but not mine. So the next time she did that, I asked her. She smiled, and said she didn't know.

This sort of thing has happened repeatedly, to me and other women. I hoped it would happen less as I got older, or as the world got better. It's not that I mind being called by my first name. It's that I'd like the same respect as Professor X. 

A test of character

For a problem I was working on, I needed to know the answer to a particular mathematics question. Hoping that specialists in the area would know the answer or could figure it out, I asked around.

At conferences, I met one specialist after another whose knee-jerk response was "It's trivial." They seemed to expect me to be satisfied with that, but I pointed out that I didn't just want the answer, I wanted a proof. They couldn't produce one, and seemed annoyed with me.

The top people in the field didn't behave that way. They thought about it briefly and decided they didn't know.

I learned that rather than going through the usual routine of "It's trivial" and "But I'd like to know a proof," it saved time to begin with "I've asked Serre, Tate, and Mazur and they didn't know. But it's closer to problems you've worked on, so I thought you might be able to help."

How did the specialists respond? In a sage and serious tone, they replied "Oh, that's a very hard problem."

But it was the same problem that had been "trivial" a few months before. I wondered whether "It's trivial" had less to do with the mathematical question itself, than with the person I was asking, and (perhaps) their perception of me.

Then I asked Ralph Greenberg the question. We had a long mathematical discussion. He came up with cases where the result held, and other cases where it didn't. (It turned out to depend on whether the field was a finite field, a number field, a function field, etc.) 

Since then, I think of Ralph as a hero (and a "mensch"). And I think of that mathematical question as a test of character.

Examples of small groups

 W, an undergraduate math major, was having trouble in the algebra course she was taking. In desperation she asked a professor she knew, Robert Gunning, what she should do. He told her to contact me, because I was an algebraist. Plenty of male grad students were algebraists; I don't think it was a coincidence that Gunning sent her to one of the few female grad students. W was the only female student in the algebra class.

The course was supposed to cover the basics of group theory. I asked W some questions to try to figure out how much she knew. She floundered. So I asked her to give me an example of a group. She struggled, but eventually I guessed she was trying to give an infinite cyclic group. I asked for an example of a finite group. She was stumped. I asked what examples of finite groups had been given in class. W claimed there had been none. I found her claim to be highly implausible.

W had another implausible claim. She said that the course skipped over the basics and instead taught more advanced material, since the other students had already learned algebra through various programs such as summer math camps.

I found a copy of Herstein's "Topics in Algebra", and I gave her a list of problems to solve before we would meet again the next week.

At tea a few days later I ran into Professor B, who taught the algebra course. I casually enquired about the course. One question I asked was "What examples of groups did you give?" He replied "None. The students should be smart enough to come up with examples on their own." He volunteered that since almost all the students knew the material already from summer math camps and the like, he didn't see a point in teaching them things they already knew, so he assumed the basics and started with more challenging material. He wasn't concerned about the one or two students who hadn't seen the basics.

It was very late in the semester. While it might have been theoretically possible for W to learn the material on her own and catch up to her classmates, it would have been a Herculean task. She did try.

Sensibly, she changed her major to statistics.

"Name one!"

On a committee to evaluate people across all fields, I was the representative for many of the STEM fields. That I was a mathematician came up frequently at our meetings. During the week, we came in at our convenience to read files.

One day, X, Y, and I were sitting around the table in the file room. As we read files, X and Y chatted amiably. They laughed about how all mathematicians are poorly dressed. And how mathematicians hold their glasses together with tape. I tried to ignore them.

Eventually, the insults reached a level where I didn't feel comfortable keeping quiet. In as friendly a voice as I could muster, I said "Some of the people in my department dress quite well."

X shot back, "Yeah, right! Name one!"

I looked down at my clothes. By pure luck — or more truthfully, my awareness that the better I dressed with this committee, the better the candidates I represented fared in the committee's evaluations — I happened to have been quite well dressed that day. I gestured towards my clothes, but they didn't get the hint.

Did they intend to deliberately insult me?

I don't think so. I think it's more likely that they didn't think of me as a mathematician (or maybe even as an academic). I wondered whether the STEM candidates we evaluated would have fared better with a man representing them, well-dressed or not.

I named a mathematician — a former Dean — who dresses nicely. They expressed doubt, and continued their chatter.

After I finished reading files, on my way down in the elevator, a well-dressed woman complimented me profusely on my lovely outfit. I smiled, and wished X and Y had been there. But I still don't know what I should have done to make them remember that I'm a mathematician.

Stage whisper

 Professor Q was supporting candidate Y and I was supporting candidate X, for a postdoc position.

During the hiring meeting, Q said to me in a stage whisper that was heard by everyone in the room, "You're only supporting X because she's a woman."

I pointed out that:

•   Almost all the candidates I had supported since I arrived at Ohio State were male.
•   All of the candidates he had ever supported were male.
•   No one accused him of only supporting his candidates because they were male.

I found out later that Q and the department chair had made a secret deal, and had already promised Y a position. They did this so that Y would use our university as the sponsoring institution on his application for an NSF postdoctoral fellowship. The chair and Q hoped that the department would decide on its own to extend an offer to Y, so they wouldn't have to admit that they had violated departmental rules by making a secret promise of a job offer. Q's stage whisper was because he felt he needed to undermine the case for X, to make sure that Y got an offer.

In the end, Y was offered both an NSF fellowship, and a postdoc position from us. He turned down the latter and went elsewhere with the NSF.

"I'd be happy to hire her if she were male."

Professor H, the department chair, was a good guy who usually did the right thing.

D applied for a job at Ohio State, after having had a couple of postdoc positions. The consensus was that her file wasn't good enough for an offer at the assistant professor level, but it was a strong file for a postdoc position.

Professor H refused to consider D for a postdoc. "But she's a top candidate," I said, and H agreed. 

Why didn't she get the job? 

Professor H said that if D were male, he'd be happy to hire her for a postdoc position. But she was female. H said that the higher administration might accuse us of gender discrimination if we offered D only a postdoc, when she was so many years past the PhD. It didn't matter to him that we had made offers to men with similar files to hers, including about the same number of postdoc years.

I find it ironic that the fear of a gender discrimination accusation was the reason D was denied a position that she would have gotten had she been male.

"Don't tell anyone you have this!"

 The following post is reminiscent of the January 15, 2018 post.

When negotiating a job offer, it can be useful to know what others are earning. Salaries at state universities are often public, though they can be hard to find. One sometimes confronts dirty looks or open hostility from those who would prefer to keep the information secret. 

 I knew that the University of California had a salary scale. On one job interview in 2004, I asked the department chair if I could see it. He gave me a startled look that seemed to say that he viewed my question as highly improper. He waited for me to retract my request, but I said nothing and waited. 

 He went to his computer, printed out a page, folded it in half to hide the data, handed it to me, and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "Don't tell anyone you have this!" 

 That evening I looked at the page he gave me, and saw that it gave a url. I checked online, and sure enough he had printed out a page from a public website.

J. SMITH and Miss Jane DOE

Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge consisted of courses at the first year graduate level.

Early in my first term, an attendance sheet was passed around in each course.

The first time I got such a sheet, I wrote "A. SILVERBERG", using the same format as those who signed before me, and passed it to the students behind me.

Sometime later, I realized that a young man was towering over me. He had come up behind me, from the back of the classroom. 

He placed the attendance sheet on my desk and said "You haven't put your name on this."

Was he hitting on me, and wanted to know my name?

I said "Yes, I have," and pointed to my name.

The young man turned bright red with embarrassment, and retreated with the sheet.

In a different course later in the week, the other woman who was taking some of the Pure Mathematics Part III courses got the sheet before I did. She wrote "Miss Sarah REES". I realized that the young man assumed I hadn't put my name because there were no names in the format "Miss Alice SILVERBERG".

I decided that I probably wouldn't like Miss Sarah Rees, and we wouldn't have anything in common. I was very wrong!

I eventually got used to these lists of names. When the Churchill College students had to sign up with a doctor under the National Health Service, the list of available doctors was in the format "J. SMITH" for the male doctors and "Miss Jane DOE" or "Mrs. Jane DOE" for the female doctors. Or maybe it was "Dr. J. SMITH" for the men. I never understood why we needed to know the marital status and first names of the women, but not the men.

Three Reasons

When I was offered an opportunity to spend the academic year 1979-80 as a student at the University of Cambridge, I went to a Harvard junior faculty member who was from England, and asked for advice. He told me:

No one in the Cambridge maths department will speak to you, for three reasons:

• The first is that you're a woman. The other students are reserved Englishmen who are shy about speaking to women, so they won't speak to you.
• The second reason is that you're American. They're not accustomed to speaking to foreigners, so they won't speak to you.
• And the third reason is that they don't speak to anyone. So they certainly won't speak to you.

This was both a good joke, and good advice. I did become friends with some of the other students, but it helped to know in advance that I would have to try harder.

When I returned for a brief visit a year after I left, I was surprised that I was greeted warmly by faculty who had seemed oblivious to my existence when I was a student. Some of the people I met in my year there are friends to this day.

There are many communities in the world, with different customs, values, and traditions. It makes life interesting. Some of my richest experiences come from living in another culture.

Math Hookers in the House of Ill Repute

by Miriam Kadansky and Alice Silverberg

When we were 15 years old, we spent 8 weeks at the Ohio State University as students in the Ross Program, a summer math camp for high school students from all over the country. The program was very intense. We worked nearly day and night, eking out about 4 hours of sleep each night.

We did have some time for exercise; our info sheet said "the boys will receive locker permits which will allow them to use the tennis courts, gymnasium, baseball fields and the swimming pool. The girls may also use the tennis courts at any time and the pool on designated evenings" (which turned out to mean just Wednesday evenings, the one time the boys were not allowed to cavort naked).

The counselors were crucial to the program's success. They were college kids who worked very closely with the high school students, and lived with us in the dorms.

The dorms were sex-segregated and were locked at night, after which we couldn't get into the boys' dorm and they couldn't get into ours.

The 39 boys had the benefit of 24-hour access to the 15 male counselors, while the 6 female students (4 in high school, and 2 who were OSU undergrads) only had 24-hour access to the 2 female counselors. We decided that wasn't fair; everyone should have equal access to all 17 counselors.

Miriam, the feminist and the most organized among us, encouraged us to protest. So Bindu, Lisa, and the two of us marched as a delegation to the math department and presented our demands.

Dr. Ross's secretary didn't know what to do with us, so she sent us to a young staff member cum grad student. His nickname was "Joe Cool", and he cultivated that image by wearing dark sunglasses indoors. Later, Alice came to think of him as the department bouncer, whom the department would sic on women (usually civil service staff who were hard to fire) to make their lives miserable enough that they'd leave.

We presented our demands to Joe. We wanted everyone to be in the same dorm, so all the students would have equal access to the counselors.

Joe Cool peered at us over his sunglasses, and replied that what we were asking for was "against the laws of the state of Ohio". If the dorm were coed, then it "would be called a House of Ill Repute and you would be labeled prostitutes", he told us.

We left in a state of shock. We had never before been called prostitutes (at least not in our hearing). When we told the older counselors what Joe had said, they informed us that just a year or so earlier, all the students had lived together in a coed dorm. Joe was just trying to get us to stop complaining.

"They don't have a history of sending students to Princeton"

 

I once read that by the 1920s, every major mathematics department in the country allowed women to be PhD students except Princeton, which didn't grant PhDs to women until the 1970s. (Side note: female grad students at Harvard got Radcliffe degrees until the 1960s.)

One spring day in the early 1980s, in Princeton's math department Common Room, someone asked the Graduate Chair about the next entering class of graduate students. After he told us about one of the star students, we asked if Princeton had accepted any women. He told us of several women they thought about admitting but decided against.

A typical case was a student at one of the all-female Seven Sisters schools (he had trouble remembering which one). She had top grades and great letters of recommendation. Princeton rejected her because her college didn't have a history of sending students to Princeton for math grad school (not surprising since Princeton had been a men's school until recently). The Graduate Chair didn't know what these good letters and grades really meant, unlike those from all-male colleges where he knew the faculty and Princeton had an established network.

I learned from this that Princeton's history as an all-male university continued to skew its graduate admissions decisions for years after the university decided to admit women. In much the same way, the Ivy League's practice of recruiting heavily from historically all-male prep schools like Exeter and Andover continued to skew its undergraduate admissions for years after the universities went coed.

They knew the law and obeyed it

For years I had a recurring nightmare. Instead of being a professor serving on a qualifying exam or PhD thesis defense committee to grill a stressed-out graduate student, I was the student.

As I stood at the blackboard, the committee bombarded me with questions. But instead of mathematics questions, they asked:

"How old are you?"

"When did you get your undergraduate degree?"

"Where did you get your undergraduate degree?"

Once they satisfied themselves that I had gotten my degree at a sufficiently precocious age and from a sufficiently prestigious institution, they started in on more personal questions. I kept trying to bring them back to the mathematics topics I was supposed to be tested on, but they kept interrupting me with irrelevant questions. Every so often the committee would discuss how they felt about my answers.

The exam (and nightmare) ended with no math questions being asked.

While I never saw a real exam like that, the nightmare probably came from how the mathematical community evaluates people, and the contrast with what I had seen at IBM.

I spent the academic year 1988-89 on a fellowship at IBM's research center in Yorktown Heights. One day, Don Coppersmith showed me the CV of an applicant for the fellowship, and asked for my opinion of it.

The first thing I did was calculate the candidate's age based on the birthdate on the CV. I remarked approvingly on how young the candidate was when he got his PhD.

Don snatched the CV out of my hand, and told me that they're not allowed to take age into account. He said it was a mistake that we saw the birthdate---HR should have removed it. 

Whenever anyone asks me about my year at IBM, I say "The main difference I saw between IBM and academia was that at IBM, they knew the law and obeyed it."

A quick way to reject a paper

The Annals of Mathematics is a journal headquartered in Princeton. While I was a grad student, an Annals editor stopped another professor on the third floor hallway in Fine Hall. The editor showed his colleague a paper that had been submitted to the Annals, and asked for his opinion. The colleague immediately turned to the page with the author's university affiliation. He remarked on the lack of prestige of that (large public Midwestern) university and concluded that, due to where it came from, the paper should be rejected since it was very unlikely to meet the high standards of the journal. The editor thanked him for his help.

The rules of the game

The next story goes well with my September 10 post "We'd love to hire a woman".

When you know the rules of the game, it's easier to win. But how do you find out the rules, and what do you do if the rules you're told aren't the real rules, or if the rules keep changing?

Lenore Blum was Deputy Director at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley. She found me in the MSRI library one day in May of 1993, and asked me to be on a panel of mathematicians to give career advice to a group of female undergraduate and graduate mathematics students from around the country. I told her that I'm not very good on panels (I'd much rather have time to reflect, than to feel pressured to give a quick response), so I declined.

But I attended the event as a member of the audience. Lenore was the moderator. The panelists were young female mathematicians who were visiting MSRI or nearby institutions. After the panelists had their say, Lenore turned it over to questions. When the questions petered out, Lenore called on the chair of the Berkeley math department, who was sitting next to me.

"Jack, could you please tell these students what they would have to do to become mathematics professors at UC Berkeley?" Lenore was asking for the rules of the game.

Jack's reply was something like: "They should enter Harvard at age 16, graduate summa cum laude, get a scholarship to study in England for a year, then go to Princeton for grad school, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship."

The first thing that struck me was that Jack himself hadn't followed this path. The second thing that struck me was that the number of Berkeley professors who had followed that path was probably not far from zero. The third thing that struck me, in looking at the roomful of female students, was that it was already too late for any of them to follow that path. Was the quality of their future work irrelevant? I wondered to myself "are these really the rules of the game?"

Stunned, I almost didn't hear Lenore saying "Alice, could you please tell us about your career?" My first reaction was annoyance that Lenore hadn't honored my preference not to speak. But as I started to answer, I felt as if I were in a cartoon where a lightbulb turns on over my head. And I was impressed with how clever Lenore was.

I turned towards Jack, and answered Lenore's question. "I entered Harvard at age 16, graduated summa cum laude, got a scholarship to study in England for a year, then went to Princeton for grad school, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship." 

You could have heard a pin drop. Then Lenore asked Jack, "Why don't you hire her?"

Jack asked me when I got my PhD, and based on my response, told me to apply to Berkeley in a couple of years.

I continued to work hard and publish. Two years later I applied for a position at UC Berkeley. I wanted the job, but I knew I wouldn't get it. So why did I apply? Because I didn't want them to have the excuse "But she never applied." I applied every year thereafter, until Paul (a Berkeley professor) told me not to apply; they were never going to hire me.

At least they didn't tell me that I hadn't followed the rules of the game.

How do I know how good it is, if I don't know who wrote it?

When a paper is submitted for publication, the editors send it out for expert opinions. The first time I was asked for my opinion about a computer science paper, I blurted out "How am I supposed to know how good it is, if I don't know who wrote it?" 

From that, I realized how crucially my judgment of the work depended on my opinion of who did it.

I was accustomed to refereeing mathematics papers, where the authors' names are revealed to the referees. But computer science often has double-blind reviewing, where the reviewers don't know the identities of the authors. It took me awhile to get used to this. I found that I was trying to guess the authors' identities. But that lessened as I've learned how often my guesses are wrong!

I wonder how much our opinions of the work are shaped by what we learn from seeing the authors' names.

"HIRE ME!"

I think I could write a book about job interviews. I think many women in academia could. Here's a story about a job interview I went on in 2004. 

It was at a university where I knew the Dean. He encouraged me to apply for the position.

The schedule included a 50 minute interview with the Hiring Committee. Contrary to the picture above, I was seated at one of the short ends, with the committee lined up on both sides of the long skinny table. I'm guessing the Chair was at the far end, facing me. I felt as if I were looking down a long tunnel; the phrase "running the gauntlet" came to mind.

I'm sure there were other questions, but I remember only one. They said they wanted to hire a woman, and asked me how to go about doing that.

It's possible I've been asked similar questions informally at interviews, by friends in one-on-one conversations. But this was a formal part of the interview, at which I'd be graded on my answer. What was the right answer?

At the time, it seemed to me that the obvious response was to jump up and down and shout "HIRE ME! HIRE ME!"

"HIRE ME!" Dare I say it?

But why hadn't they thought of that?

I decided I needed to think a bit more, so I stalled for time. 

I asked them what they'd been doing so far. They had made offers to women and (mostly) men, but the women had turned down their offers to go to better places.

Since I've often been asked the question (though not usually for a grade), I had a ready answer, which I gave them: "Put together a diverse hiring committee. Advertise widely, with an ad that gives the criteria you're really looking for. Interview the people whose files best satisfy those criteria. To the extent that you can, make offers that are attractive enough that they're accepted. Go down your list until the positions are filled or you run out of acceptable candidates."

(In other words, do what you should be doing anyway.)

They weren't at all happy with my response. 

After further discussion, I got the sense that they wanted me to tell them "You've been doing great! There's nothing else you should be doing!" I hadn't. They chose to view my reply as criticism, and they weren't pleased.

The rejection email from the department Chair began: 

Dr. Silverberg:

The Hiring Committee has met and made its decision. It is not good for you. We will not be making an offer to you.

I gave it a 5 or 6 week cooling off period, then emailed the Dean:

Dear T,

Although I haven't been asked for feedback on my job interview, I thought it might be useful to give feedback on one aspect.

Much of my interview with the hiring committee consisted of discussing the question of how to hire more women. In retrospect, my feelings about having been asked that question, and then been rejected for the position, are negative. By the way, I gave standard, well-known answers to that question, but was left with the impression that some of the committee reacted to my response defensively and negatively.

I hope that this feedback is helpful for your future job searches.

Best regards,

Alice

The Dean never replied.

If I had it to do over again, knowing that I would be rejected (for whatever reason), it would have been more fun to have jumped up and down and shouted "HIRE ME! HIRE ME!"