"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.