Likely Weekend

When I applied to some Ivy League colleges, applicants received postcards in the mail, sometime before the final decisions, stating whether their admission was likely, possible, or unlikely.

Brown University invited those who got "likely" postcards (at least the reasonably local ones, such as the New Yorkers) to visit for a couple of days, so Brown could try to convince us to go there. They brought the New Yorkers there on buses.

When we 16- and 17-year-old high school kids got off the buses, we were met by students who had promised to put us up in their dorm rooms. The host for a friend of mine didn't show up. My host wanted to take me and leave, but my friend (whom I'll call Jane) didn't want to be left alone, and convinced me to stay while she waited for her host.

After everyone else was gone, and Jane's host still hadn't appeared, at Jane's insistence my host grudgingly took the two of us back to her dorm room.

My host had a bad cold. It was long ago that she had agreed to take in a prospective student, thinking it might be fun and she'd be doing a good deed. Now that she was ill it no longer sounded like fun, but it was too late to back out of it. After some small talk with my host, Jane and I figured out we weren't wanted and went off to wander the campus.

That evening my host sent us to a party in the dorm. The music was much too loud, and there was way too much beer. The party-goers got drunker and wilder, and someone threw a beer bottle through a window. Broken glass swam in the pond of beer that covered the floor.

A Brown undergrad took Jane aside to chat with her. Eventually Jane returned to inform me that the undergrad had invited her to his dorm room with the excuse that the party's music was too loud to talk over, and I had to go with them. Assuming she wanted to go but was wary enough to want a chaparone, I followed along behind Jane and the undergrad. I was happy to escape the rapidly rising beer pond.

The Brown student had a friend from Bowdoin visiting for the weekend, so there were four of us.

The dorm room had exactly two chairs. Jane ran over to one of the chairs and sat down. The Brown guy plopped into the other chair. That left just the bed. The bed was in a corner of the room, so its head and right side were up against walls. I sat near the corner between the two free sides. The Bowdoin boy sat next to me.

Eventually, he put his arm over my shoulder. I moved away, to disengage. A few minutes later he moved closer. Shortly after that, he again tried to put his arm around me, and I moved further away. This continued, as we gradually moved from the free corner of the bed towards a wall. Jane watched our slow motion pantomime in amusement, and had trouble stifling her laughter.

I worried about what I'd do when we got to the wall and he had me trapped. 

The one good thing about the guys being amazingly drunk was how frequently they had to run down the hall to pee. 

Each time the Bowdoin boy left to pee, I stood up, walked back to the corner of the bed (to maximize how long it would take for him to push me to a wall), and sat down. When the Bowdoin boy returned, the cycle started all over again.

I stayed because I assumed Jane (inexplicably) wanted to be there. Finally, both guys left to pee at the same time, leaving Jane and me alone. I quickly asked her, "Do you want to be here?" She replied, "No!" 

I grabbed her hand, pulled her out the door, and ran down the hall. Just before we disappeared down the stairs, I heard the guys call out to us as they exited the men's room.

Perhaps our Thank You cards to Brown University for its kind hospitality should have consisted of the one word "unlikely".

I was glad I hadn't drunk anything at the party and was clear-headed. After a few parties at still-largely-male Ivy League schools, I quickly learned not to drink alcohol at college parties. 

I also abandoned the ideas, ingrained in American girls of my generation, that women mustn't hurt men's feelings and have to help men save face. I think male classmates appreciated when my rejections of their advances were clear and direct, so they didn't needlessly waste their time with someone who wasn't interested in them.

Conflicts of Interest --- Say what you mean, mean what you say, and don't change the rules of the game

My main advice on Conflict of Interest policies is: 

Say what you mean, and mean what you say.

My main advice on enforcing Conflict of Interest policies is: 

Don't change the rules in the middle of the game.

Someone I'll call Y was on a panel to evaluate proposals. He had followed the Conflict of Interest policy to the letter, reporting in advance, in writing, all the conflicts of interest he was supposed to report.

However, in the presence of the entire panel, the Program Officer who ran the panel claimed that Y needed to recuse himself from the discussion about a proposal written by someone I'll call Q. According to the Program Officer, Y had a conflict of interest with Q, because Q was a co-author of X, and X was Y's wife.

Due to her many experiences with discrimination based on marital status, X kept her personal and professional lives separate, and did not discuss her personal life in professional settings. Neither X nor Y had ever told the Program Officer about any personal relationship between them. Anything the Program Officer thought he knew came from gossip. The Program Officer's discussion, in front of the panel, of his assumptions about X's and Y's personal lives violated their privacy. 

The official Conflict of Interest policy did not state that being a relative of someone's co-author constituted a conflict of interest. Y pointed this out to the Program Officer, who still insisted on recusal.

Curiously, for a later panel, that same Program Officer decided not to recuse himself when he expressed support for a proposal submitted by the husband of his own collaborator.

The last people to realize they have a conflict of interest are the people who have a conflict of interest. That's why it's important to have a clear, unambiguous algorithm for recusal, rather than letting people decide for themselves.

Similarly, the last people to realize that it's not OK to deviate from the official policy or make ad hoc decisions on a case-by-case basis are the enforcers of the policy. Many cases I saw personally where someone was held to a more stringent Conflict of Interest policy than the official one involved a woman, and the attitude of the male enforcers was, "This doesn't smell right to me. It feels like she's trying to get away with something."

Don't change the policy in midstream, and especially, don't change it in midstream based on a particular case; it's easy for the enforcers' prejudices to override fairness. When something doesn't technically violate the policy but "just doesn't smell right" to you, that doesn't justify making new rules on the fly. If it's not right, your Conflict of Interest policy should have covered it. If an objective party determines that the policy needs changing, change it after the current round; don't enforce a different policy than the one that's in place at the time.

Conflict of Interest policies often include personal, financial, professional, and other types of conflicts. Some policies require giving out much more information than is necessary, and sometimes that information gets circulated to co-PIs or others who don't need to know it. It should suffice to recuse oneself and say that one has a conflict of interest that falls under the policy, without being forced to divulge details about the conflict (e.g., one's marital status, or who one is married to).

To summarize, conflict of Interest policies should:

    (1) be clear, unambiguous, and sensible;

    (2) not require people to divulge irrelevant or unnecessary information;

    (3) be sent to everyone who needs to abide by it, early enough to give them a chance to refuse to take part in the activity to which it applies.

A one-to-one correspondence

"The proportion of female mathematicians who are married to male mathematicians is much higher than the proportion of male mathematicians who are married to female mathematicians. So women must be going into mathematics to find a husband, while men do math because they're interested in it," male mathematicians have told me over the years, in all seriousness. 

Nowadays, some might call this "boy math". Whenever I hear this logic I reply, "Do you agree that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the set of female mathematicians married to male mathematicians and the set of male mathematicians married to female mathematicians?" 

They agree. 

I continue, "So the number of female mathematicians married to male mathematicians is exactly the same as the number of male mathematicians married to female mathematicians. The large difference in percentages is simply because mathematics is a male-dominated field."

They're astonished to realize that the numbers are exactly the same. There's something counterintuitive about it and it takes awhile to sink in, even for mathematicians.

Flirting with students

Lolita (probably not her real name) waltzed into the last class of the semester, just as the class was ending. Her blouse was so low-cut that it would now be called a wardrobe malfunction, her skirt was short and tight, and she twirled her hair and smiled seductively as she spoke to the professor in a soft, husky voice.

Professor Q smiled broadly. He was totally smitten. It wasn't just her hair that she was wrapping around her little finger.

As she continued to twirl her hair, smile, and bat her eyelashes at him, Lolita asked Professor Q for course notes so she could study for the final exam. Professor Q flirted back at Lolita, and then turned to me and asked me to lend Lolita my notes. He knew I was a good student, and had (strangely) complimented me on my handwriting---he knew that I would have good notes.

I had never seen Lolita before. She hadn't come to a single class. I didn't know her name. 

I had worked hard in the course and taken good notes. I wrote them in a three-subject notebook, so when I gave Lolita my notes, I gave her all my notes for three math courses I was taking that semester. Notes that I needed myself to study for the final exams. While I didn't think that Professor Q's request was reasonable, I didn't think I could say no to him.

Another student told me later that Lolita was a senior who had already submitted her applications to med school. Lolita majored in math since it was a major with very few requirements. For this course, she just needed to get by. She didn't bother going to class since she could use her sex appeal to get what she wanted.

I did somehow manage to get her to give back my notes before my final exams---late enough to make me anxious, but early enough that Lolita was miffed.

Why do I remember this story? Because it was one of several episodes that taught me how women were viewed at some of the top universities. These stories had an impact on how I view Harvard, the mathematics community, and academia. The faculty gave the female students incentive to flirt with them. But it was the job of the faculty to treat students fairly and equitably, and not be influenced by flirting or by how the students dressed. If the faculty were showing favoritism to students who flirted with them, they weren't doing their jobs.

Years later I tried to talk to Professor Q about discrimination at Harvard and some of his unfair or problematic treatment of women, including his more recent behavior towards young female mathematicians. I felt that I was in a better position to talk to him about it than were more junior colleagues or students, and I hoped that by talking with him I could help them. Professor Q treated it like a joke and exclaimed, "but Alice, I LOVE women!" as he pretended to leer at me. 

Whenever I try to talk to him about it, he evades, dodges, or acts uncomfortable. The information is not welcome.

Sometimes, it's more than cluelessness.