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.

Wednesday, January 3, 2018

The Letter

I used to point out how few women were invited to participate in conferences at the Oberwolfach mathematics research center, until someone said to me "If you weren't invited to Oberwolfach, it must be because you're not good enough to be invited." 

From this and many similar experiences, I learned that my observations and suggestions are more likely to have a positive effect when I don't stand to benefit. I have more credibility when I'm the only female invited speaker, than when there are no female speakers.

It's more effective when someone else speaks up on your behalf.

But when the speaker list is all male and probably shouldn't be, who should speak up?

In 2006, at my suggestion the Association for Women in Mathematics enacted a policy that anyone can ask the AWM President to send a letter to organizers of a conference reminding them of the benefits of considering potential speakers from a wide pool so that good people are not overlooked (if not for their current conference, then for future ones). Suggestions included having a diverse organizing committee, making an effort to think of potential speakers whose demographics, mathematical interests, or geographical areas aren't represented on the organizing committee, using the Mathscinet searchable database to check that important areas or people aren't overlooked, and contacting colleagues and organizations that could help suggest names or ways to go about finding them. We referred to it as "The Letter" (as in "I wonder if those conference organizers might benefit from being sent The Letter").