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.