mathbabe

Last night I had dinner with a friend who is a post-doc in math, and she was mentioning that her students, especially in the lower-level calculus classes, generally don’t refer to her as “professor.” This would be fine since she’s not yet a professor, but she also mentioned they do refer to graduate student men in the same department as professor. She’s a young looking woman, and my guess is they simply don’t know better. Here’s what my advice to her was (and as usual, I’d give this advice to both men and women).

On the first day of class, introduce yourself and put your name on the board, explain when and where you got a Ph.D., what your field of research is, what your current job is, as well as office hours and homework policies. In addition, wear a button-down shirt that first day of class. It’s kind of ridiculous but it works, in the sense that the students will be more impressed with you, which translates into them behaving more respectfully.

Moreover, it’s totally appropriate and not manipulative to explain your credentials. It’s probably most important for calculus, because generally those students don’t really want to be there, at least not all of them. Upper level classes contain students who are more psyched about math and eager to like their professors. I say this partly from experience, partly from talking to other people about their experiences, and partly via information I glean from the student evaluations I’ve read.

Speaking of evaluations, at some point I want to write about the noise that come from calculus evaluations, because that may as well be an entire subfield of statistics in itself. For example, I think there may be more variation depending on semester than depending on professor, due to the way kids take calculus in high school. In general it’s really hard to infer how good a job you did teaching based on calculus evaluations.

However, there is some signal. I remember reading about a study that said when some guy who was teaching two sections was introduced the first day in one of the sections by a distinguished-looking professor who went on about the instructor’s credentials, that class had much better end-of-semester evaluations, even though the content of the two sections was identical. Even more evidence that you should formally introduce yourself, if not bring in a friend for the job.

Last night I was talking to a friend of mine about my teaching experiences, and what’s it’s like to be a woman in math and to be taken seriously. We were going over the standard stuff, that women are too self-effacing compared to men and tend not to strut their stuff enough. But then I remembered this story from my early teaching experiences that kind of put a different spin on that.

I was in grad school, and over the summer I went to Berkeley to teach at a women in math program, which was still called the “Mill’s program” even though it was being held at Berkeley. It was a really fun experience, something like 30 days of lecture and problem session, and I led the problem sessions.

It was some time in the second week when, one day because of something or other, I hadn’t prepared completely and I apologized to the class for being slightly unprepared. I said something like, “sorry I’m not completely prepared today”. I remember thinking that, in spite of that, the class went very well and there was no “damage” from my being unprepared. Every other day I was completely, perhaps overly prepared, and that was the only day I ever mentioned something about my preparedness.

At the end of the summer we got back teaching evaluations, and I remember that a full half of the evaluations described me as unprepared.

I made a promise to myself never ever to apologize for anything again. And I never have, and I’ve never been accused like that since. Which isn’t to say I pretend to be a perfect teacher, but there are subtle ways of dealing with imperfections (my favorite: turn a self-criticism into a flattery. Instead of saying, oh how stupid I am for not thinking of that, say oh how smart you are for thinking of that. Generosity is not a negative in my experience!).

Going back to last night, though, it’ a two-way street. Women may be too self-effacing, but other people (including women!) are absolutely too dismissive. It’s a very important thing to keep in mind when you are teaching or presenting.

One other thing, in a one-on-one, professional setting, I believe you can apologize and not be executed for it (sometimes and depending on the person), but in a teacher-students setting, or when you’re presenting to clients in business, or even when you’re presenting to colleagues, you’re giving a performance and need to be flawlessly confident.

In an ideal world, we would use this information to learn to become better audiences, to not be dismissive and overly harsh of self-effacing people, and I do try to keep this in mind when I’m in the audience. But it’s going to take lots of effort for this to happen on a large scale, especially among strangers. It’s a cultural axiom in a certain sense.

My advice to young people, especially women: never apologize.

My cousin recently sent me a link to this article about women in science. Actually it’s really about jobs in science, and how much they suck, and how women are too practical to want them. It’s definitely interesting- and pretty widely read, as well, although I’d never seen it. It makes a few excellent points, especially about the crappy amount of money and feedback one gets as an academic, two issues which were definitely part of my personal decision to leave my academic career.

I think his overall argument, though, is simultaneously too practical-minded and not practical-minded enough. And although his essay is about science, I’ll concentrate on how it relates to math.

It’s too practical in that it doesn’t really understand the attraction- the nearly carnal desire- people have to math. It essentially assumes that after some amount of time, maybe 20 years, people will lose interest in their subject, perhaps because they are getting poorly paid.

Is this really true? Maybe for some people this is true, but the nerds I know are nerds for life – they don’t wake up one day thinking math isn’t cool after all. And from what I know about people, they acclimate pretty thoroughly to their standard of living by the time they are 40.

It’s not practical enough, though, because it doesn’t get at one of the most important reasons women leave math, namely because they are married and maybe have kids and they simply can’t be that person who moves across the country for a visiting semester in Berkeley because their husband has a job already and it’s not in Berkeley.

[As a side note, if someone wants to actually encourage women in math, and they are loaded, I would encourage them to set up a fund that would pay costs for quality childcare and airplane tickets for kids when woman go to math conferences. You don’t even need to help organize the babysitting, just pay for it. It would help out a lot of young women and free them up to go to way more conferences, evening the playing field with young men.]

In fact there are plenty of women who are super nerdy and would love to go do math across the country, but when it comes to choosing between that lifestyle and having a family life, they will choose the family life more times than not. Really it’s the “nomadic monk” system itself that is crappy for women at that moment, even if they are theoretically happy to be a poor nerd for the rest of their lives.

I have another complaint (which will make it sound like I don’t like the essay but actually I do). It says that people in science don’t have the ability to switch careers, essentially because they don’t have the money. But that’s really not true, at least in math, and I’m a testament to the possibility of switching careers. One thing a nerd is really good at is learning new things quickly.

I also thought that there was something missing about the alternative jobs he mentions, in industry or otherwise, which is that, yes you do get paid better outside of academics, but on the other hand pretty much any nonacademic job requires you to have a boss, which can be really fine or really horrible, and restricts your vacation time to 3 or 4 weeks. By contrast the quality of life as an academic is, if not luxurious, at least much more under one’s control.

Let me tell you a bit about my childhood.

I grew up in Lexington, MA, which is an upper-middle class liberal suburb of Boston.  Most of the people I went to school with had parents that either worked at or went to Harvard or M.I.T. – it was a pretty nerdy, intellectual environment.  My parents, both computer scientists, moved there for the public schools.

In spite of that, I was a hopeless, pathetic nerd.  My idea of fun was practicing classical piano, watching “Amadeus” over and over again, and factoring license plate numbers in my head.  When you add to that the facts that I wore glasses, braces, and was chubby, you are talking about one pathetic young nerd girl.  When, you top *that* off with the fact that I went through puberty at the wrong time, you can imagine that I went through junior high wondering what everyone was smoking.  Oh, and did I mention that my mom hated shopping so I was always wearing one of two bright pink stretch polyester pants?  And that my personal hygiene skills were undeveloped?  You get the picture.

I was lucky enough to have a best friend starting in 7th grade, who saved me from many pits of despair (although not all).  But come high school, my self-esteem was pretty crappy, and the only thing I seemed to be good at, my refuge, was piano and math team.

My parents did an excellent job of not really caring about what I did for the most part, so I wasn’t at all pressured into doing math, and definitely not pressured into doing music.  When I came home with an advertisement from a math camp at Hampshire College in western Massachusetts, though, my parents essentially bribed me to go.  It didn’t take much convincing, I was intrigued.

Here’s where we get to the title of the post.  When I got there, I quickly noticed there were 50 boys and 10 girls.  And then I noticed that a bunch of these guys were kind of… cool, they were mostly from places like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science and Evanston, places I’d never heard of but which obviously placed a premium on being a math nerd.  Then, this was the miracle, I noticed that these cool, sexy guys, thought I was cool and sexy.  OMG, I was a math babe!

It was the first moment I had ever felt like I belonged somewhere, that I was with my peeps.  I learned lots of math that first summer, and although most of the specifics kind of wore away over the following year, the feeling that I had a community never did.  Actually the one thing I did really learn for good that summer was how to solve the Rubik’s cube using group theory (a subject for another post!).  And I distinctly remember carrying around a Rubik’s cube like a piece of platinum my entire junior year of high school, just because it reminded me that I was, in fact, a math babe, at least in one context (although not here!  not here whatsoever!).

Which reminds me!  This summer, I’m very excited to be going back to the same math camp to teach as a senior staff member.  Here’s the list of stuff I have prepared to teach this crop of math studs and math babes:

1) magic squares and generalizations. I just figured out how to generate all 3×3 magic squares! I love those little guys.
2) elementary number theory: fundamental theorem of arithmetic
3) cool geometry stuff like bisectors of angles and sides and all those cool theorems
4) pigeon hole principle, lots of examples
5) euler’s formula and the platonic solids
6) cool stuff with perfect numbers and non-perfect numbers
7) proof by induction, lots of examples
8) basic graph theory
9) bipartite graphs and related theorems.
10) basic ramsey theory
11) more number theory
12) farey fractions
13) continued fractions and the golden ratio

I can’t friggin wait!!  Please send me more suggestions if I’m missing something that they really need to know.  By the way I’m only teaching the first three weeks, because I couldn’t arrange for the whole 6- the second half they will be learning more specialized subjects from some very cool mathematicians.

Actually there’s another reason I ultimately decided to call this blog “mathbabe,” namely when I googled it, I was first of all offended that the name wasn’t already taken by some other woman math nerd who posting about cool stuff, but what really offended me was that there’s another site with a very similar name which simply shows nearly naked women next to cliff notes on basic math subjects.  WTF?!?  It is ridiculously obvious to me that math babes should be doing math, not adorning it.  So I kind of had to call myself mathbabe after that.

One of the first things I’d like to set people straight on is what it takes to be a woman in math.  The short answer is, a warrior.  The longer answer starts like this.  At least in this country, in this culture*, it required near-constant resistance to the niggling feeling that you don’t belong, that you are an outsider, and that you will always be an outsider.  It takes the belief in yourself as an abstract thinker, as a scientist, and as a _source_ of wisdom.  This is completely counter to how the average woman has been taught to behave: demurely, modestly, quietly.  Unleaderly.  And the above description refers only to the psychological barriers, not the underlying mathematics.

Considering how difficult the material itself is, it’s not surprising how many women drop out eventually.

To be fair, we are seeing many more women finishing college degrees in mathematics and Ph.D.s in mathematics, and that is frigging awesome.  But we are still not seeing that many professors, not in the numbers you might think from the Ph.D. programs.  Why is this?  I think I can explain this at least in part.  When one decides to become a math major, it’s a difficult decision in terms of the surrounding cultural expectations, but there’s very good, very consistent feedback (at least outside of Harvard), namely in the form of homework and test grades from undergrad classes.  In other words, it may be a weird decision to be a woman in math, but you can *see* your success whenever your homework comes back with a good grade.  It’s proof positive that you are doing ok.  To some extent in grad school this feedback loop continues, and with luck you have a good advisor who is encouraging and nurturing.  However, once outside of grad school the feedback loop all but vanishes and you are left to decide, *within yourself* whether you are good at what you do.  This is when you as a woman (and of course this happens to men too but for whatever reason, maybe just hormones, maybe culture, not as often) question yourself, and then look to the outside world for affirmation, and to be honest that’s a pretty tough moment.  Many women leave at that moment.

In some sense I am one of them, because I did leave academics.  But I left because I decided I wanted more, so more of a moment of strength than a moment of fear.  I got a Ph.D. at Harvard, went to M.I.T. for a post-doc, then became an assistant professor at Barnard College.  I got to the point where I was pretty sure I’d be able to get tenure, or in other words to the point that I was sure I deserved tenure, and I looked around and decided, this isn’t the kind of feedback loop I want in my life.  I need actual feedback, in real time.  I left to be a quant in finance (and since then a data scientist at an internet ad company).  I feel very lucky that I could make that decision without fear, and I still consider myself a woman in math, and I still encourage women in math to stay in math or at least stay mathematical.

I think if people understood what women in math need to do in order to just be themselves every day, they would be treated less like anomalies and more like superheroes.  It’s a tough thing to do, and they should be respected for it.  And they are cool.  I mean, what’s cooler than someone who lives as an outsider and has come to terms with that?  It’s a strength that not everyone has.

Here’s the thing, I don’t want to end this post on a negative note.  In spite of everything I’ve said, being a math babe totally rocks, because math rocks.  I hope to convincingly illustrate just how much math rocks in future posts.

* I’ve talked to women outside the US about being mathematicians in their country.  One thing that commonly comes up is that in Italy, and to some extent France, it is much more common to see women mathematicians.  Why is this?  One of my Italian women mathematician friends described it to me like this:  in Italy, the academic track to become a mathematician is identical to that of becoming a high school math teacher- indeed the two tracks diverge only after a masters degree.  The outcome of this system is that it is not seen as a particularly glamorous or even difficult profession- perhaps similar to that of an engineer.  According to her, truly ambitious Italians become politicians, not mathematicians.