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.

"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.

"Name one!"

On a committee to evaluate people across all fields, I was the representative for many of the STEM fields. That I was a mathematician came up frequently at our meetings. During the week, we came in at our convenience to read files.

One day, X, Y, and I were sitting around the table in the file room. As we read files, X and Y chatted amiably. They laughed about how all mathematicians are poorly dressed. And how mathematicians hold their glasses together with tape. I tried to ignore them.

Eventually, the insults reached a level where I didn't feel comfortable keeping quiet. In as friendly a voice as I could muster, I said "Some of the people in my department dress quite well."

X shot back, "Yeah, right! Name one!"

I looked down at my clothes. By pure luck — or more truthfully, my awareness that the better I dressed with this committee, the better the candidates I represented fared in the committee's evaluations — I happened to have been quite well dressed that day. I gestured towards my clothes, but they didn't get the hint.

Did they intend to deliberately insult me?

I don't think so. I think it's more likely that they didn't think of me as a mathematician (or maybe even as an academic). I wondered whether the STEM candidates we evaluated would have fared better with a man representing them, well-dressed or not.

I named a mathematician — a former Dean — who dresses nicely. They expressed doubt, and continued their chatter.

After I finished reading files, on my way down in the elevator, a well-dressed woman complimented me profusely on my lovely outfit. I smiled, and wished X and Y had been there. But I still don't know what I should have done to make them remember that I'm a mathematician.

Stage whisper

 Professor Q was supporting candidate Y and I was supporting candidate X, for a postdoc position.

During the hiring meeting, Q said to me in a stage whisper that was heard by everyone in the room, "You're only supporting X because she's a woman."

I pointed out that:

•   Almost all the candidates I had supported since I arrived at Ohio State were male.
•   All of the candidates he had ever supported were male.
•   No one accused him of only supporting his candidates because they were male.

I found out later that Q and the department chair had made a secret deal, and had already promised Y a position. They did this so that Y would use our university as the sponsoring institution on his application for an NSF postdoctoral fellowship. The chair and Q hoped that the department would decide on its own to extend an offer to Y, so they wouldn't have to admit that they had violated departmental rules by making a secret promise of a job offer. Q's stage whisper was because he felt he needed to undermine the case for X, to make sure that Y got an offer.

In the end, Y was offered both an NSF fellowship, and a postdoc position from us. He turned down the latter and went elsewhere with the NSF.

"I'd be happy to hire her if she were male."

Professor H, the department chair, was a good guy who usually did the right thing.

D applied for a job at Ohio State, after having had a couple of postdoc positions. The consensus was that her file wasn't good enough for an offer at the assistant professor level, but it was a strong file for a postdoc position.

Professor H refused to consider D for a postdoc. "But she's a top candidate," I said, and H agreed. 

Why didn't she get the job? 

Professor H said that if D were male, he'd be happy to hire her for a postdoc position. But she was female. H said that the higher administration might accuse us of gender discrimination if we offered D only a postdoc, when she was so many years past the PhD. It didn't matter to him that we had made offers to men with similar files to hers, including about the same number of postdoc years.

I find it ironic that the fear of a gender discrimination accusation was the reason D was denied a position that she would have gotten had she been male.

"Don't tell anyone you have this!"

 The following post is reminiscent of the January 15, 2018 post.

When negotiating a job offer, it can be useful to know what others are earning. Salaries at state universities are often public, though they can be hard to find. One sometimes confronts dirty looks or open hostility from those who would prefer to keep the information secret. 

 I knew that the University of California had a salary scale. On one job interview in 2004, I asked the department chair if I could see it. He gave me a startled look that seemed to say that he viewed my question as highly improper. He waited for me to retract my request, but I said nothing and waited. 

 He went to his computer, printed out a page, folded it in half to hide the data, handed it to me, and said in a conspiratorial whisper, "Don't tell anyone you have this!" 

 That evening I looked at the page he gave me, and saw that it gave a url. I checked online, and sure enough he had printed out a page from a public website.

J. SMITH and Miss Jane DOE

Part III of the Mathematical Tripos at the University of Cambridge consisted of courses at the first year graduate level.

Early in my first term, an attendance sheet was passed around in each course.

The first time I got such a sheet, I wrote "A. SILVERBERG", using the same format as those who signed before me, and passed it to the students behind me.

Sometime later, I realized that a young man was towering over me. He had come up behind me, from the back of the classroom. 

He placed the attendance sheet on my desk and said "You haven't put your name on this."

Was he hitting on me, and wanted to know my name?

I said "Yes, I have," and pointed to my name.

The young man turned bright red with embarrassment, and retreated with the sheet.

In a different course later in the week, the other woman who was taking some of the Pure Mathematics Part III courses got the sheet before I did. She wrote "Miss Sarah REES". I realized that the young man assumed I hadn't put my name because there were no names in the format "Miss Alice SILVERBERG".

I decided that I probably wouldn't like Miss Sarah Rees, and we wouldn't have anything in common. I was very wrong!

I eventually got used to these lists of names. When the Churchill College students had to sign up with a doctor under the National Health Service, the list of available doctors was in the format "J. SMITH" for the male doctors and "Miss Jane DOE" or "Mrs. Jane DOE" for the female doctors. Or maybe it was "Dr. J. SMITH" for the men. I never understood why we needed to know the marital status and first names of the women, but not the men.

Three Reasons

When I was offered an opportunity to spend the academic year 1979-80 as a student at the University of Cambridge, I went to a Harvard junior faculty member who was from England, and asked for advice. He told me:

No one in the Cambridge maths department will speak to you, for three reasons:

• The first is that you're a woman. The other students are reserved Englishmen who are shy about speaking to women, so they won't speak to you.
• The second reason is that you're American. They're not accustomed to speaking to foreigners, so they won't speak to you.
• And the third reason is that they don't speak to anyone. So they certainly won't speak to you.

This was both a good joke, and good advice. I did become friends with some of the other students, but it helped to know in advance that I would have to try harder.

When I returned for a brief visit a year after I left, I was surprised that I was greeted warmly by faculty who had seemed oblivious to my existence when I was a student. Some of the people I met in my year there are friends to this day.

There are many communities in the world, with different customs, values, and traditions. It makes life interesting. Some of my richest experiences come from living in another culture.

Math Hookers in the House of Ill Repute

by Miriam Kadansky and Alice Silverberg

When we were 15 years old, we spent 8 weeks at the Ohio State University as students in the Ross Program, a summer math camp for high school students from all over the country. The program was very intense. We worked nearly day and night, eking out about 4 hours of sleep each night.

We did have some time for exercise; our info sheet said "the boys will receive locker permits which will allow them to use the tennis courts, gymnasium, baseball fields and the swimming pool. The girls may also use the tennis courts at any time and the pool on designated evenings" (which turned out to mean just Wednesday evenings, the one time the boys were not allowed to cavort naked).

The counselors were crucial to the program's success. They were college kids who worked very closely with the high school students, and lived with us in the dorms.

The dorms were sex-segregated and were locked at night, after which we couldn't get into the boys' dorm and they couldn't get into ours.

The 39 boys had the benefit of 24-hour access to the 15 male counselors, while the 6 female students (4 in high school, and 2 who were OSU undergrads) only had 24-hour access to the 2 female counselors. We decided that wasn't fair; everyone should have equal access to all 17 counselors.

Miriam, the feminist and the most organized among us, encouraged us to protest. So Bindu, Lisa, and the two of us marched as a delegation to the math department and presented our demands.

Dr. Ross's secretary didn't know what to do with us, so she sent us to a young staff member cum grad student. His nickname was "Joe Cool", and he cultivated that image by wearing dark sunglasses indoors. Later, Alice came to think of him as the department bouncer, whom the department would sic on women (usually civil service staff who were hard to fire) to make their lives miserable enough that they'd leave.

We presented our demands to Joe. We wanted everyone to be in the same dorm, so all the students would have equal access to the counselors.

Joe Cool peered at us over his sunglasses, and replied that what we were asking for was "against the laws of the state of Ohio". If the dorm were coed, then it "would be called a House of Ill Repute and you would be labeled prostitutes", he told us.

We left in a state of shock. We had never before been called prostitutes (at least not in our hearing). When we told the older counselors what Joe had said, they informed us that just a year or so earlier, all the students had lived together in a coed dorm. Joe was just trying to get us to stop complaining.

"They don't have a history of sending students to Princeton"

 

I once read that by the 1920s, every major mathematics department in the country allowed women to be PhD students except Princeton, which didn't grant PhDs to women until the 1970s. (Side note: female grad students at Harvard got Radcliffe degrees until the 1960s.)

One spring day in the early 1980s, in Princeton's math department Common Room, someone asked the Graduate Chair about the next entering class of graduate students. After he told us about one of the star students, we asked if Princeton had accepted any women. He told us of several women they thought about admitting but decided against.

A typical case was a student at one of the all-female Seven Sisters schools (he had trouble remembering which one). She had top grades and great letters of recommendation. Princeton rejected her because her college didn't have a history of sending students to Princeton for math grad school (not surprising since Princeton had been a men's school until recently). The Graduate Chair didn't know what these good letters and grades really meant, unlike those from all-male colleges where he knew the faculty and Princeton had an established network.

I learned from this that Princeton's history as an all-male university continued to skew its graduate admissions decisions for years after the university decided to admit women. In much the same way, the Ivy League's practice of recruiting heavily from historically all-male prep schools like Exeter and Andover continued to skew its undergraduate admissions for years after the universities went coed.

They knew the law and obeyed it

For years I had a recurring nightmare. Instead of being a professor serving on a qualifying exam or PhD thesis defense committee to grill a stressed-out graduate student, I was the student.

As I stood at the blackboard, the committee bombarded me with questions. But instead of mathematics questions, they asked:

"How old are you?"

"When did you get your undergraduate degree?"

"Where did you get your undergraduate degree?"

Once they satisfied themselves that I had gotten my degree at a sufficiently precocious age and from a sufficiently prestigious institution, they started in on more personal questions. I kept trying to bring them back to the mathematics topics I was supposed to be tested on, but they kept interrupting me with irrelevant questions. Every so often the committee would discuss how they felt about my answers.

The exam (and nightmare) ended with no math questions being asked.

While I never saw a real exam like that, the nightmare probably came from how the mathematical community evaluates people, and the contrast with what I had seen at IBM.

I spent the academic year 1988-89 on a fellowship at IBM's research center in Yorktown Heights. One day, Don Coppersmith showed me the CV of an applicant for the fellowship, and asked for my opinion of it.

The first thing I did was calculate the candidate's age based on the birthdate on the CV. I remarked approvingly on how young the candidate was when he got his PhD.

Don snatched the CV out of my hand, and told me that they're not allowed to take age into account. He said it was a mistake that we saw the birthdate---HR should have removed it. 

Whenever anyone asks me about my year at IBM, I say "The main difference I saw between IBM and academia was that at IBM, they knew the law and obeyed it."

A quick way to reject a paper

The Annals of Mathematics is a journal headquartered in Princeton. While I was a grad student, an Annals editor stopped another professor on the third floor hallway in Fine Hall. The editor showed his colleague a paper that had been submitted to the Annals, and asked for his opinion. The colleague immediately turned to the page with the author's university affiliation. He remarked on the lack of prestige of that (large public Midwestern) university and concluded that, due to where it came from, the paper should be rejected since it was very unlikely to meet the high standards of the journal. The editor thanked him for his help.

The rules of the game

The next story goes well with my September 10 post "We'd love to hire a woman".

When you know the rules of the game, it's easier to win. But how do you find out the rules, and what do you do if the rules you're told aren't the real rules, or if the rules keep changing?

Lenore Blum was Deputy Director at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley. She found me in the MSRI library one day in May of 1993, and asked me to be on a panel of mathematicians to give career advice to a group of female undergraduate and graduate mathematics students from around the country. I told her that I'm not very good on panels (I'd much rather have time to reflect, than to feel pressured to give a quick response), so I declined.

But I attended the event as a member of the audience. Lenore was the moderator. The panelists were young female mathematicians who were visiting MSRI or nearby institutions. After the panelists had their say, Lenore turned it over to questions. When the questions petered out, Lenore called on the chair of the Berkeley math department, who was sitting next to me.

"Jack, could you please tell these students what they would have to do to become mathematics professors at UC Berkeley?" Lenore was asking for the rules of the game.

Jack's reply was something like: "They should enter Harvard at age 16, graduate summa cum laude, get a scholarship to study in England for a year, then go to Princeton for grad school, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship."

The first thing that struck me was that Jack himself hadn't followed this path. The second thing that struck me was that the number of Berkeley professors who had followed that path was probably not far from zero. The third thing that struck me, in looking at the roomful of female students, was that it was already too late for any of them to follow that path. Was the quality of their future work irrelevant? I wondered to myself "are these really the rules of the game?"

Stunned, I almost didn't hear Lenore saying "Alice, could you please tell us about your career?" My first reaction was annoyance that Lenore hadn't honored my preference not to speak. But as I started to answer, I felt as if I were in a cartoon where a lightbulb turns on over my head. And I was impressed with how clever Lenore was.

I turned towards Jack, and answered Lenore's question. "I entered Harvard at age 16, graduated summa cum laude, got a scholarship to study in England for a year, then went to Princeton for grad school, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship." 

You could have heard a pin drop. Then Lenore asked Jack, "Why don't you hire her?"

Jack asked me when I got my PhD, and based on my response, told me to apply to Berkeley in a couple of years.

I continued to work hard and publish. Two years later I applied for a position at UC Berkeley. I wanted the job, but I knew I wouldn't get it. So why did I apply? Because I didn't want them to have the excuse "But she never applied." I applied every year thereafter, until Paul (a Berkeley professor) told me not to apply; they were never going to hire me.

At least they didn't tell me that I hadn't followed the rules of the game.

How do I know how good it is, if I don't know who wrote it?

When a paper is submitted for publication, the editors send it out for expert opinions. The first time I was asked for my opinion about a computer science paper, I blurted out "How am I supposed to know how good it is, if I don't know who wrote it?" 

From that, I realized how crucially my judgment of the work depended on my opinion of who did it.

I was accustomed to refereeing mathematics papers, where the authors' names are revealed to the referees. But computer science often has double-blind reviewing, where the reviewers don't know the identities of the authors. It took me awhile to get used to this. I found that I was trying to guess the authors' identities. But that lessened as I've learned how often my guesses are wrong!

I wonder how much our opinions of the work are shaped by what we learn from seeing the authors' names.

"HIRE ME!"

I think I could write a book about job interviews. I think many women in academia could. Here's a story about a job interview I went on in 2004. 

It was at a university where I knew the Dean. He encouraged me to apply for the position.

The schedule included a 50 minute interview with the Hiring Committee. Contrary to the picture above, I was seated at one of the short ends, with the committee lined up on both sides of the long skinny table. I'm guessing the Chair was at the far end, facing me. I felt as if I were looking down a long tunnel; the phrase "running the gauntlet" came to mind.

I'm sure there were other questions, but I remember only one. They said they wanted to hire a woman, and asked me how to go about doing that.

It's possible I've been asked similar questions informally at interviews, by friends in one-on-one conversations. But this was a formal part of the interview, at which I'd be graded on my answer. What was the right answer?

At the time, it seemed to me that the obvious response was to jump up and down and shout "HIRE ME! HIRE ME!"

"HIRE ME!" Dare I say it?

But why hadn't they thought of that?

I decided I needed to think a bit more, so I stalled for time. 

I asked them what they'd been doing so far. They had made offers to women and (mostly) men, but the women had turned down their offers to go to better places.

Since I've often been asked the question (though not usually for a grade), I had a ready answer, which I gave them: "Put together a diverse hiring committee. Advertise widely, with an ad that gives the criteria you're really looking for. Interview the people whose files best satisfy those criteria. To the extent that you can, make offers that are attractive enough that they're accepted. Go down your list until the positions are filled or you run out of acceptable candidates."

(In other words, do what you should be doing anyway.)

They weren't at all happy with my response. 

After further discussion, I got the sense that they wanted me to tell them "You've been doing great! There's nothing else you should be doing!" I hadn't. They chose to view my reply as criticism, and they weren't pleased.

The rejection email from the department Chair began: 

Dr. Silverberg:

The Hiring Committee has met and made its decision. It is not good for you. We will not be making an offer to you.

I gave it a 5 or 6 week cooling off period, then emailed the Dean:

Dear T,

Although I haven't been asked for feedback on my job interview, I thought it might be useful to give feedback on one aspect.

Much of my interview with the hiring committee consisted of discussing the question of how to hire more women. In retrospect, my feelings about having been asked that question, and then been rejected for the position, are negative. By the way, I gave standard, well-known answers to that question, but was left with the impression that some of the committee reacted to my response defensively and negatively.

I hope that this feedback is helpful for your future job searches.

Best regards,

Alice

The Dean never replied.

If I had it to do over again, knowing that I would be rejected (for whatever reason), it would have been more fun to have jumped up and down and shouted "HIRE ME! HIRE ME!"

Personal Questions

A group of faculty took me out to the interview dinner after the talk I gave during a job interview in 2004. The Dean's wife, R, sat next to me. I was meeting her for the first time. R told me some interesting stories about her family, and her complicated relationship with her sister. But things got complicated for me when R persisted in asking me increasingly personal questions.

I've been asked overly personal questions many times at job interviews. How to deal with it is always a challenge.

When I was a grad student, Princeton convened a meeting so that female faculty could give advice to female grad students, to prepare us for being treated differently from our male counterparts during our job searches. They told us that women are asked a lot of "illegal questions" at job interviews ("Are you married?" "Do you have children?"), and there's always the dilemma of what to do. They pointed out that we could refuse to answer, but then we probably wouldn't get the job. They recommended answering truthfully (and hoping one could change the culture someday).

Several times I tried to change the subject, but R was insistent. I started out answering truthfully some of her questions about my relationship with my siblings, much as we were advised. But the questions got more and more personal, and I felt more and more uncomfortable. This wasn't the sort of conversation I would normally have with a stranger, or in the hearing of faculty who were interviewing me for a job. I didn't want to hurt my chances of getting a job offer by offending the Dean's wife, but finally I said in as polite a voice as I could muster that since it was a job interview, I didn't feel completely comfortable with personal questions such as these.

She was very upset, and loudly told me so. I don't know how many faculty had been paying attention to our conversation, but now they all were. So much for trying to make a good impression!

Over the years, universities have gotten better at training hiring committees on best practices for hiring, including not asking "illegal questions". But they don't train spouses of faculty members. (Some do suggest that non-faculty spouses not be involved in job interviews.) And they don't always train hiring committees, Deans, or Chairs to step in when someone else asks the "illegal questions".

Don't tell anyone. They'll be jealous.

When I was a child, my mother told me a story. When she accepted one of her first jobs, her boss told her "Don't tell your salary to your co-workers, since they'll be jealous." After she eventually quit, she and her co-workers went to lunch and ended up exchanging salary information. It turned out that my mother had been the lowest paid employee. That's when she realized that the boss didn't want her to discuss salary so she wouldn't find out how poorly she was being paid.

So when I got a job offer and the department Chair said "Don't tell your salary offer to anyone in the department, since they'll be jealous," I burst out laughing.

From an early age, I've had a fondness for the adage "knowledge is power".

They melted like butter

Z came to my office hours to ask for help with her homework. As usual, I used the Socratic Method. I asked her questions designed to help her figure out the answers herself, so that she'd have the skills she would need to solve problems on her own.

But rather than answering my questions, she was silent. I looked up from the textbook. Z was batting her eyelashes at me. I don't know if anyone ever batted their eyelashes at me before, but this was unmistakable.

I ignored the batting, and continued as before. Z got more and more flustered and confused. She expected me to give her the answers to the homework problems, and didn't understand why I wasn't doing so.

I looked more closely. I saw an ordinary-looking female Ohio State undergraduate student. Dyed blond hair, lots of makeup, low-cut blouse. Quite a lot of mascara on the batting eyelashes.

I continued to treat her the same way I would have treated any student (of any gender). But I realized what was going on. She was doing exactly what she had always done at office hours to get the instructor to tell her the answers. I must have had colleagues who melted like butter, and she expected me to do the same.

If Z had thought of it as flirting, she might have realized why it had worked on some of my (male) colleagues. My colleagues had trained her to act in a way that gave her the homework solutions, and she had learned that lesson well. Her confusion told me that she knew that it (usually) worked, but didn't understand why.

I don't think she came back to office hours. I worried about Z---that someone would take advantage of her naivety. But it would have been hard to give her helpful life advice, while staying within the boundaries of our professional relationship.

The Letter

I used to point out how few women were invited to participate in conferences at the Oberwolfach mathematics research center, until someone said to me "If you weren't invited to Oberwolfach, it must be because you're not good enough to be invited." 

From this and many similar experiences, I learned that my observations and suggestions are more likely to have a positive effect when I don't stand to benefit. I have more credibility when I'm the only female invited speaker, than when there are no female speakers.

It's more effective when someone else speaks up on your behalf.

But when the speaker list is all male and probably shouldn't be, who should speak up?

In 2006, at my suggestion the Association for Women in Mathematics enacted a policy that anyone can ask the AWM President to send a letter to organizers of a conference reminding them of the benefits of considering potential speakers from a wide pool so that good people are not overlooked (if not for their current conference, then for future ones). Suggestions included having a diverse organizing committee, making an effort to think of potential speakers whose demographics, mathematical interests, or geographical areas aren't represented on the organizing committee, using the Mathscinet searchable database to check that important areas or people aren't overlooked, and contacting colleagues and organizations that could help suggest names or ways to go about finding them. We referred to it as "The Letter" (as in "I wonder if those conference organizers might benefit from being sent The Letter").

It's the ones who know better

Sometimes, the people who disappoint you the most aren't the ones who do the wrong thing; it's the ones who know better, but don't stand up for what's right.

Before deciding on the next math department Chair at Ohio State, the Dean interviewed all the tenured and tenure-track faculty, one by one. He reported that the main concern of the faculty was a lack of collegiality. He said that three names recurred in the interviews. Around the (purely metaphorical) water cooler we asked each other "Who's the third?" Not because we couldn't think of a third one, but because there were several possibilities.

Of the three "non-collegial" faculty, the first two were obvious. One I'll call Nick Machiavell (not his real name). Soon after I arrived at OSU, Nick told me the useful and important observation that "collegiality" is a codeword that academics use to marginalize people they don't like. While there's a lot of truth in that, it was also an excuse Nick used to ignore criticism of his behavior.

For example, Nick often disagreed with our colleague Greg, but he might phrase it by stating that Greg was stupid. Greg recalls standing up at a faculty meeting and asking everyone, "why do you put up with this behavior?" After one of the times that Greg pushed back, Nick implemented a new strategy. Right after Greg said Y at a faculty meeting, Nick, rather than calling Greg stupid, said that anyone is stupid who says Y.

Nick and I often had the same views on what the right outcome should be. But he and I had very different views on how to achieve that outcome. Nick became so unpopular in the math department that when some of us (including Nick) wanted X to happen, the best strategy was to try to prevent Nick from attending the meeting at which X was discussed.

Hamlet Prince (not his real name) was well educated, well spoken, and well respected by his colleagues. Ham wanted the department to hire R for one of our postdoc positions. R had a strong file. Nick told me that he was against the appointment, since "eastern Europeans are lazy --- they stop working after you hire them." Nick added that he knew this was an "illegal reason" to not hire someone, but that he'd deny saying it, if I told anyone.

I let Ham know that I and others would support his proposal to hire R, despite Nick's objections (which Nick had also told Ham, "illegal reason" and all). However, Ham (who was a tenured full professor) told me he decided to back down since standing up to his colleagues wasn't in his best interests. 

Without the strong support of Ham, who was closest to R's field, the department wouldn't offer a postdoc position to R. While I understand the need to pick one's battles, I wished that Ham would choose to fight more of them.

Greg was eventually so miserable at OSU that he accepted a job offer elsewhere. Shortly before he left, I asked Greg if Nick drove him out. He replied that it wasn't the Nick Machiavells of the department who drove him away, it was the Hamlet Princes. It's the ones who know better, but aren't willing to do the right thing.

"There are no blacks in Ohio"

 When I arrived at Ohio State University in 1984, OSU's student body looked much more homogeneous than those of Harvard and Princeton. It seemed as if most of the female students dyed their hair blond, and most of the male students wore baseball caps (often backwards). But what I found most striking was that the students seemed almost uniformly white. Even Princeton, with its history of "eating clubs" that at various times discriminated against women, Jews, Catholics, and people of color, looked racially diverse compared to Ohio State. I asked a colleague why this was. The answer was "there are no blacks in Ohio." As I drove east from campus to the Columbus airport through miles and miles of African American neighborhoods (before Interstate 670 was completed), I wondered what that really meant.

Until 1987, OSU had open admissions; I was told that all you needed to get in was an Ohio high school diploma. In 1987, OSU raised its academic standards for admission to the Columbus (flagship) campus, basing it on grades, test scores, and minimum course requirements. Looking around campus, it seemed to me that the number of students of color went up. When I've told people this, they've immediately tried to correct me: "No, you mean the number went down."

I mean it went up. Enough for me to notice. Why was that? I asked around, and was told that open admissions at Ohio State had been on a first-come, first-served basis. Submitting an application by the publicly stated deadline wasn't soon enough. The high school students from the wealthy white suburbs were told by savvy guidance counselors the date by which they needed to submit their college applications in order to be accepted to the main campus of Ohio State. The inner city schools didn't have that information. 

Open admissions policies often have noble goals of equal access. But to achieve equal opportunity and equal access, one needs equal information.

A Response to Feedback

While many of my stories thus far are from the 1980s or 1990s, for almost all of them I could tell very similar stories that happened recently. 

I've postponed some tales of recent incidents since they're more problematic to write about. In some cases, I still need to work with the people involved. For some, I might be able to make more of a difference behind the scenes, rather than making the stories public now. And for some of the recent stories, and all of the more serious incidents, I would like to distance myself from them a little more so that I can write about them in a way that's helpful and compassionate. I'm hoping that readers will stick around as I figure out how to do that!

It's interesting that some people consider the stories to be horrifying or depressing. I've mostly posted stories I find amusing; I haven't yet written about the more extreme incidents that seriously and negatively impact someone's life or career. Those are still to come!

Why is this job candidate like a writing-desk?

Mr. Big had big demands, according to the department Chair who was trying to hire him. He wanted a large salary, an ample slush fund, a nice office, and a tenure-track assistant professorship for his wife. The Chair told the math faculty this last demand as if it were equivalent to negotiating for a large desk. Lewis Carroll asked "Why is a raven like a writing desk?" I wanted to ask "Why is this woman like a writing desk?"

It was one of the first departmental hiring committee meetings since I arrived at Ohio State. Mr. Big's qualifications were stellar, but my colleagues were worried that he was too much of an "operator" and that things might sour after we hired him. We didn't discuss the qualifications of "Mrs. Big." The Chair's case for her was "If we want Mr. Big we have to hire his wife. If we later decide that we don't like him, we just won't give her tenure when she comes up for it." In other words, if we don't like him, we can get rid of them both in six years by kicking her out, independent of her qualifications for tenure.

I was new and didn't know the rules, but I was pretty sure this wasn't in the tenure rulebook. If it went unchallenged, did that mean it was being agreed to? As the faculty member with the lowest seniority, I didn't want to risk my own chances for tenure by speaking out; I signaled to others more senior than me, but they didn't want to get involved.

Finally, I raised my hand and said meekly, "I'm sitting at the back where it's hard to hear. Perhaps I heard wrong. Surely we wouldn't deny her tenure just because we don't like him?" The chair of the hiring committee quietly and briefly said something about how we wouldn't do that.

The next day I ran into the department Chair's wife, while she was photocopying his exams for the course they were both teaching. (She had recently earned a PhD in mathematics education and was a lecturer in the math department.) She had heard that I had challenged the department Chair at a faculty meeting. She told me that wasn't in my best interests.

She had been friendly to me in the past. She had told me tales of growing up in Brooklyn, and learning that her family was in the Mafia---she'd complain about some bully and the next day her cousins would break his kneecaps.

Sometimes there's a fine line between friendly advice and a threat. I was very protective of my kneecaps for the next few weeks.

The committee voted for a fancy job for him (they could hardly not; he was Mr. Big after all), but only a temporary instructorship for her. While these may have been the correct decisions based on their qualifications, someone told me that it was merely a face-saving way of saying no to him. The department Chair, embarrassed about not meeting Mr. Big's demands, went against department rules and didn't make either offer. 

I never found where in the rulebook it said that we could deny someone tenure because we don't like her husband, but maybe that's because I hadn't been given a tenure rulebook. Thankfully, my kneecaps are still intact.

The Obvious Suspect

 

Professors P and Q sat across from me in the mathematics common room at the University of Cambridge. They were American professors, visiting the UK from a large midwestern university. I was an American student, visiting Cambridge on a fellowship for the 1979-1980 academic year. I was reading a mathematics text, trying to mind my own business.

P and Q were deep in discussion, trying to answer the question "Why are there so few female mathematicians?" Since they were Americans, I could hear every word.

They examined the premise that it was due to prejudice and discrimination. They rapidly dismissed that, on the grounds that the people in power in mathematics were just like them, and they were obviously good people who couldn't possibly unfairly discriminate or succumb to prejudice. Much as I tried not to eavesdrop, from that point on I felt as if I were listening to two bumbling detectives trying to solve a murder mystery. They had ruled out the obvious suspect. Who were they going to declare to be the culprit, and how were they going to get there? I had heard such debates many times before, so I had my suspicions about where they were heading. Nonetheless, I ardently hoped for better.

They eliminated one premise after another. Could it be lack of opportunities? Surely not. Lack of interest? Well, maybe, but that wouldn't fully account for it. They considered everything they could think of, until they were left with only one option.

At that point, I just couldn't restrain myself. It was clear what they were about to say, and I didn't want them to say it. Too many times had I heard (always male) professors conclude that women weren't as good at mathematics because they were genetically inferior.

I introduced myself to P and Q, apologized for listening to their conversation, and told them that the answers to their question were prejudice and discrimination. (Actually, it's likely I told them there were three reasons: "discrimination, discrimination, and discrimination", alluding to the adage about real estate and location.) I pointed out that Ivy League universities had only recently begun to admit women, and were, even then, doing so in small numbers. I told them some recent stories about Harvard, from personal experience. And I pointed out some facts about the recent history of (and discrimination against) women at Cambridge.

I don't know whether any opinions changed. Their minds were probably made up before they started. But they listened politely, even though I disagreed with them. (I wish that happened more often nowadays!)