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.

Monday, December 16, 2024

"Women don't do math"

At Harvard in the 1970s, I was accustomed to seeing funding opportunities that were only open to men. It was unusual to see something open only to women. When I was a senior looking for funding for grad school, I noticed that I was eligible for the Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship. I submitted an application to the Harvard committee responsible for sending a nomination to the national selection committee.

When I wasn't chosen as Harvard's nominee, I assumed that my file wasn't strong enough. 

Harvard encouraged students to find out why they were rejected for things, since the feedback might be helpful in the future. I was the good little girl who did what I was told, so I dutifully asked why I was rejected.

I was surprised to learn that it wasn't because my application wasn't strong enough. The reason I wasn't chosen as Harvard's nominee was that the Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship is a scholarship for women. The committee reasoned that women don't normally do math, so the national committee would most likely choose among nominees in fields with many women, such as English or History. The Harvard committee thought there was no point in selecting me, since they assumed a mathematician wouldn't make the cut.

That afternoon, at tea in the math department common room, I ran into math grad student Lisa Mantini. I told her why I was rejected for the fellowship.

Lisa told me that an Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship had funded her first year in grad school. The national committee had awarded her the fellowship, even though she was a mathematician.

I was used to being discriminated against for being a woman. As far as I knew, this was the first time I was discriminated against for being a mathematician. 

Postscript:
By reading background for this story, I learned that Wellesley College tried to hire Alice Freeman as a professor of mathematics in 1877 (she turned down the offer to help support her family and/or care for an ill sister). The following year, she turned down Wellesley's offer to teach Greek, but in 1879, the year her sister died, Freeman accepted their offer to head the History Department. Alice Freeman became President of Wellesley College in 1881, the youngest college president in the United States, at the age of 26.