"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.