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.