Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Tuesday, February 13, 2024

What's wrong with choosing a woman?

A small group of faculty, staff, and visiting faculty was having lunch in the dining hall of a Harvard dorm one day in 1990, while I was visiting Harvard. 

To convince us that Harvard treated its Afro-American Studies department very poorly, someone exclaimed "Harvard even chose a white woman as interim chair." She emphasized both "white" and "woman", with greater stress on "woman", to make the point that both were problematic.

Without thinking, I blurted out, "What's wrong with choosing a woman?" 

The senior staff person who had spoken was herself a white woman. She was surprised by the question, and she stumbled as she tried to explain how choosing a white woman undermined the department and showed Harvard's disdain for it, since clearly they should have chosen a black man. She seemed reluctant to back down, but I think she eventually wondered whether she was on shaky ground.

Whenever someone shows that they (subconsciously or otherwise) believe that putting a woman in a job devalues that job, I'm disappointed. (I'll leave to those who've thought more deeply about it than I have the question of whether choosing someone white to head Harvard's Afro-Am department undermined that department.)

More than a decade later I was asked if I'd be interested in a professorship at a place I'll call Cheshire Cat University. During my interview, female CCU grad students told me about a history of problems with the treatment of women, and how the math department had tried to address it.

At my interview with the Dean I mentioned this, and asked about the situation for women. He had heard nothing about the problems in the math department. But he told me he had set up a committee to deal with women, and made Professor Lion the committee's chair. The Dean said he thought it was smart to appoint many men to the committee and a distinguished man as committee chair, since that gave the committee more credibility.

I knew that Lion knew much less than I did about gender discrimination in academia and what to do about it. The Dean gave me the impression that I wouldn't be chosen to lead such committees, and would be passed over in favor of less knowledgeable men, whose maleness would give a "committee about women" more credibility. When the Dean spoke about Lion as if he were higher than me in the academic hierarchy, I realized that the Dean didn't have a clue that I was being hired as senior faculty and Lion's rank was no higher than mine.

The Dean wasn't the only one at Cheshire Cat who seemed clueless. A bulletin board in a hallway had names and photos of all the mathematics graduate students. I counted that more than 3/4 of the grad students were male. But when I met with the department head, he very confidently told me that the grad student gender ratio was 50-50.

The grad students took me on a lovely hike, where I heard more stories from the unhappy female students. 

When I returned to the bulletin board to confirm my computation of the gender ratio, I overheard Professor Lion in his office telling someone what a great time I had on the hike, and how impressed I was with how happy the female students were. I don't know where he got that from. Certainly not me.