When Michelle Lee (A.B. ’10) was a first-year, she thought she might one day pursue a graduate degree in mathematics. By her fourth year, the male-dominated math classes she had taken at the University made her reconsider.
“If there was more of a female presence,” said Lee, who now works at a political consulting firm in Washington, D.C., “I feel like I would still be in math.”
Despite extensive efforts to improve the balance, the U of C, like many of its peers, has a dearth of female mathematicians: Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in Mathematics Dianne Herrmann (Ph.D. ’88) has seen only one female mathematician gain tenure in her 35 years here.
The one didn’t stay long. Karen Uhlenbeck was tenured at the University from 1983–1988, but left to teach at the University of Texas.
“I’m always hopeful. I have to be, but I’ve been here—I came as a graduate student in 1975,” said Herrmann. “But other than that brief period there have been no female tenured faculty members, so I’m still waiting.”
The University of Texas has six female math professors out of its almost 45 professors. The University of Chicago has no women among its 32 tenured math professors. (Three of its four senior lecturerers, however, are women.)
It trails the math departments at M.I.T., Princeton, Harvard, and Stanford; each has between one and five tenured women on faculty. Still, none comes close to reaching a balance between men and women.
The problem extends to the rest of the University as well: There are two female economics professors and four in the physics department (a fifth works part time). Provost Thomas Rosenbaum set up a group, the Women’s Leadership Council, concerns itself with recruiting more female faculty and fostering a feeling of community among the women.
But the math department is the only major University department with no female faculty.
Fourth-year math major Anna Scott noticed that as the difficulty of her classes increased, the number of female classmates dropped.
“The harder classes tend to have less girls in them. Honors Calculus is pretty well mixed, but once you go farther in the major there are fewer girls,” Scott said.
Herrmann agreed, pointing out that in a broader sense, there are fewer women at the top. “Nationally that’s the case as well,” Herrmann said. “I don’t know the exact numbers, but it’s a pipeline issue. Women drop out along the way.”
Aware of the problem, Department Chair Peter Constantin set up a hiring group in the fall of 2008 to address the math department’s gender imbalance.
“This is one of my top priorities. We intend to maintain top quality of the department and pursue the issue of women in mathematics,” he said. “We’re a small department so we are not going to be able to make more than a few offers.”
The group searched for viable female candidates who would meet the department’s rigorous requirements. The shortlist it compiled has been the starting point for a hiring process it is currently undertaking.
“The committee’s work is done,” Constantin said. “We have a wonderful list and we are working from it.”
Constantin and his faculty are waiting for a response from one woman to whom they have offered a professorship. Their first offer was to Stanford’s Maryam Mirzakhani, who declined it for personal reasons.
“She was working on an area that we are very interested in,” Constantin said. “But her husband wanted to be on the west coast. She was very interested in working here but in the end she stayed at Stanford.”
Constantin said one problem is that, in relationships where both partners are in academia, women tend to go where their male partners have an offer.
“It is often the case that women, younger [married] women in math will have more difficulty deciding when both people work. They have to decide where to go. More often the women will follow the men, and then we have the difficulty of attracting the women,” Constantin said.
He said retaining partners is part of a larger issue of gender slant at the University across departments, and indeed, the Office of the Provost has a department dedicated to finding jobs for spouses of faculty.
Herrmann, who is joined by two other women at her level as senior lecturers, says she sees why women might stay away from a department without other female professors.
“It can be lonely to be here, if you’re the only woman here,” Herrmann said. “For a long time I was the only senior lecturer here in the department and it’s difficult to work without colleagues you can talk to, who are at your level.”
She said the lack of female professors is a self-perpetuating problem. “[The problem is] a lack of role models, a lack of somebody to go and talk to,” said Herrmann, who mentors undergraduate math majors. “There’s no choice there. If you wanted to study with a woman mathematician, you can’t do that here.”
This creates the pipeline problem; tenured math professors are necessary to mentor graduate students and lecturers, who are necessary to mentor undergraduates, and so on down the educational track.
Recent alumna Lee said having women from the math department as mentors was important to her. “I felt like I could talk to them about where I wanted to go in the future because they had been there or are there in everyday life and have to deal with these issues,” she said.
But when women in the department are not tenured, it enforces negative stereotypes, Lee said. “I didn’t feel like I was as math-confident as the men,” Lee said. “It’s an environment where the stereotype is activated over and over, especially when you see all the professors are men, and the classes are mostly men.”
As an undergraduate, Lee said she was frustrated to see the breakdown of the math department align with traditional gender roles: women in teaching positions and men in researching ones. “It just seems like the women at the University are being pushed into the traditional women roles—teaching, nurturing, advising—and the men are the researchers.”
Fourth-year Scott is interested to see how the math department brings this problem to light. “This isn’t the sort of thing that you get from class: ‘Okay guys today we’re going to talk about derivatives, and now we’re going to talk about the status of women in math,’” Scott said.
She’s happy the department is attempting to make changes, but said she can’t spend too much time thinking about the gender balance. “It’s certainly something that you can discuss, but for me it’s not something that comes into the equation when you have three problem sets for the week,” Scott said.
“There are two female economics professors and only one in the physics department.”
This is just not true. The Physics Dept’s website indicates that there are 6 female professors. I’m pretty sure at least 3 of them have tenure. You might want to check this.
(1) You quote: “It just seems like the women at the University are being pushed into the traditional women roles—teaching, nurturing, advising—and the men are the researchers.” Eh? With the exception of Diane Herrmann (who is one of three people involved with coordinating the teaching activities, the other two being male) all the women in the mathematics department (post-docs or senior lecturers) are there primarily in a research role, as are the male post-docs, lecturers, and tenured faculty. The same goes with a comparison of the research/teaching loads of male/female graduate students. (To the best of my knowledge).
(2) You note that as the level of the courses increases, there are fewer and fewer women. But this could be well explained by the fact that the women entering the courses were on average not as mathematically capable as the men entering the courses. Is there evidence to show that women and men who earn the *same* grade in a lower level course have less likelihood of taking the next level course? Not to my knowledge. From the samples I have tracked, males and females earning the same grades at a given level are equally likely to try the next course level.
(3) One of the claims made here is that the absence of women to talk to within the department is a demotivating factor for women interesting in pursuing mathematics. However, there are plenty of women for a woman to talk to, there are plenty of mathematicians for a woman to talk to, so the question is: what special utility does a woman mathematician offer to another woman mathematician that cannot be offered by a combination of women and mathematicians? I don’t see any hypothesis of what this utility could be.
(4) The article does not suggest or bring to light either discrimination in hiring/promotion processes or statements made by faculty members or others that suggest that women are incapable of doing mathematics. Nor is there any evidence of social segregation along gender lines at any level (undergraduate, graduate, or post-doc). From what I’ve observed, study groups and discussion groups of students at all levels tend to be gender-mixed in the same proportions as the overall pool from which the study group is drawn (so in an algebra class with 2:1 male:female student ratio, a typical study group would have a 2:1 male:female student ratio, rather than all-male or all-female study groups). At the graduate student level, segregation (in academic discussions) is more by discipline area than by anything else. Thus, I see no reason why it would be hard for females to learn from male role models, or vice versa.
To the extent that people have psychological inhibitions learning from others of the opposite gender, it might be more fruitful to target these psychological inhibitions than to try to create a gender balance in the faculty.
Ms. Pillsbury, thank you for the insightful article. I completely disagree with the comments made by the above, Mr. Vipul Naik, and frankly take offense to them.
The issue is clearly that there are not enough (or, sadly, any)female mentors for women wishing to pursue and academic career in mathematics. I’m not exactly certain what Mr. Naik is getting at by saying that a plausible explanation for gender imbalance is the “fact that the women entering the courses were on average not as mathematically capable as the men entering the courses,” but the quip seems like some what of a Larry Summers-esque low blow. While you may believe that women rising in the field today suffer from crippling “psychological inhibitions learning from others of the opposite gender,” the real conflict they must contend with is incompetent, bumbling male professors like YOU sir who have trouble teaching to the opposite sex.
Previous research focused on class engagement as it relates to gender has shown us that male students are more likely to actively engage in class, regardless of whether or not they understand the material and/or have something substantive to contribute while female students are more likely to be more reserved until they are confident they can contribute positively to the classroom environment. Professors must be aware of these generalized tenancies, and stop calling on the boy that raises his hand a million times while shifting their attention to the girls in the room who may be formulating their ideas in the same manner, yet just not as vocally.
As educators, it is your job to TEACH and ensure that each of your pupils gets the attention they deserve and that is necessary for them to flourish. The larger question must be then, why are we not more alarmed that these male professors have yet to be held accountable for all the careers of mathematically inclined women they have squashed?
Alum,
Firstly, for the record, Professor Naik is an incredible and very devoted teacher. So your “Larry Summers-esque low blows” are completely and utterly off the mark and foolish.
And secondly, as a woman in math I am sick to death of being told that I need to be treated like some bizarre orchid in order to “flourish”. My brain is as good as some student’s, better than other’s, and definitely worse than a few. I resent your implications that I the professor to pay me special attention so I can succeed.
You, women who cry foul, are the problem, not male professors. Stop telling me that I need special attention. Let my professors get on with their jobs, teach me the material I need to know, and compete with other students on an even playing field. I may fail. But that is usually a function of my procrastination than anything else.
And there is always the possibility that women are not as mathematically incline as men, that there are, as Professor Naik says, fewer women who are good at math. What is wrong with that? Men and women, if you’ve checked lately, are fundamentally different. There is nothing wrong with that. If fewer women want to or are able to pursue mathematics, so what?
In my opinion, this dithering about how many women are in higher level mathematics is foolish complaining by those who are unable to pull it together and succeed.
Complain all you want, but leave those of us working hard to succeed without the crutch of playing the girl card out of it.
Some clarifications.
First, I was wrong to use the noun “fact” when I said “fact that the women entering the courses were on average not as mathematically capable as the men entering the courses” since I did not provide evidence strong enough to establish it as a fact. I should have referred to it as a “hypothesis,” albeit one backed up by observation.
Also, my claim was specifically about the student populations in the mathematics classes that are intended as stepping stones to higher mathematics classes for people intending to major and do research in mathematics. My experience does not suggest a significant difference on average, either way, between males and females in most mathematics courses for non-math majors (including calculus courses that I teach/have taught), or most mathematics courses at the high school level. If the “greater male variability” hypothesis (which I am agnostic about in the context of mathematical ability, but which holds in other contexts) holds, then it should also follow that females do better than males at the lowest level mathematics courses — this may well be the case. Again, I don’t have access to large scale data from this University, but this matches up with what I know about nationwide samples collected in the US.
Third, since the use of the term “capable” or “ability” may rub some people the wrong way, I want to clarify that I was using the term as a catch-all for both specific knowledge and skills that are course prerequisites, general mathematical abilities and skills, as well as the basic discipline needed to get through the course work. It was beyond the scope of my comment to consider the contributions of genetics, culture, parenting, society, and past schooling opportunities in contributing to these.
As far as work ethic and conscientiousness are concerned, I don’t think males are higher up than females (females probably have a small advantage *on average*) so the difference boils down to specific knowledge and skills and general mathematical abilities. The course grade obtained in the previous course is, in my view, a reasonable proxy for measuring these, hence my claim that grades in the preceding course should be controlled for. My assertion was that males and females with the same grades are equally likely to take the next level mathematics course. This is equivalent to the assertion that if females are less likely to proceed to higher level mathematics courses, then this can be explained by their lower grades in the preceding course.
It may be the case that equally capable females at a given level are less likely to take the next course level (which means my assertion is wrong), and/or it may be the case that there is discrimination in grading courses so that female grades under-predict their mathematical abilities.
Regarding the comment made by “an alum nor in the field of mathmatics” I consider it to be sadly misinformed speculation. Some notes:
I did not assert the existence of crippling “psychological inhibitions learning from others of the opposite gender” — my point was that *to the extent* that such inhibitions exist (as suggested anecdotally in the article) it may be fruitful to try to help people overcome those inhibitions. The reason I brought this up is that these inhibitions are brought up as a reason to seek gender balance in the faculty, and I think that getting people to overcome inhibitions is (possibly) a simpler and more feasible solution.
I am also characterized as an “incoherent, bumbling male professor.” While I’ll leave it to others to judge “incoherent” and “bumbling,” I am a graduate student, not a professor.
The comment goes on to say that “Previous research focused on class engagement as … female students are more likely to be more reserved …” Yes, I am aware of such research. But this has little relevance to mathematics — unlike other subjects, class participation and “impressing the professor” carries little value in (most) mathematics courses. There are few extended class discussions where personality factors come into play. A greater male ability to “bluff” it might be relevant in explaining differentials in sales(wo)manship but has little relevance in mathematics, where the ability to bluff carries few rewards. It also has little relevance to my specific teaching — I do “cold calling” of students for brief, to the point answers, and I call equally on male and female students, male and female students ask questions on their own at about the same rate in class, and class participation carries no weight in grading.
As a combined Applied Math/Computer Science grad, I take offence in the proposition that women in math need a special attention from the math professors. That, being said by a woman, actually implies that women are weaker in math and a positive discrimination of the males are required. Completely disagree! Some of my son’s fellow math girl wisards chose the same incredibly hard path in high level math and (I’m sure) are not going to drop the major when the level is raised, because they were PREPARED for it in high school – by the participating in math proof sessions, numerous national/state/online competitions, math camps, tutoring in schools/local universities, teaching younger kids the art of problem solving and self-studying college level courses when they couldn’t be offered locally. They had enough suffering thru elementary courses in school. These girls and boys will not drop when the math becomes really complicated – because they LOVE it being difficult.
I graduated last year as a math major, and was one of the few females from U of C to go to graduate school in math. While I do think it would be great if more women were interested in math, I think it will be just as much of a success once people stop noticing. This is where the problem lies. Whenever I tell someone I do math, they think it’s great and noteworthy because I’m a girl. However, while in math situations, I rarely notice that I am one of the few girls, and I definitely didn’t notice (and thus didn’t miss) not having female role models in math. Basically what I’m saying is that it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: keep pointing out to girls that they are in the minority and telling them that it’s a big deal (for example, via articles like this one), and it will continue to be that way.
Rock on Brooke!
You guys didn’t think the headline through. If the ‘Women in Math’ issue is a complex problem, then it has both real and imaginary parts ;)
“The harder classes tend to have less girls in them.”
That’s “fewer”.
Problem detected!
Brooke, you said it perfectly.
I studied physics, not math, and I’m now an optical engineer. I’m the only female engineer in my company, but until someone points that out to me, I forget that I’m different. The men I work with treat me like they treat each other. It’s people in the rest of the world who make comments that can make me self-conscious and sometimes suffer from the psychological inhibitions Mr. Naik mentioned. I personally target my psyche instead of looking for a place to work with more women since I think that’s the real problem. I find it incredibly insulting that some people think I need extra attention or slack because I’m a woman. Treating women differently is only going to enforce the notion that women are not as capable as men in math related fields. I know some people think that prenatal testosterone levels are responsible for women biologically having lower math abilities than men. I could be wrong, but I think the gender gap is the result of cultural influences. Like Brooke said, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Girls learn when they’re young that they’re not supposed to be into math (I know I’ve been guilty of playing dumb to fit in). If people stop acting like it’s such an anomaly to see women and math together, I think more women would feel comfortable moving forward with a high level math-related career, and we would see that there are in fact plenty of math-able women in the world.
From what I have experienced is although girls do take up maths as a career option but only a few of them are actually inclined to the subject. Most of them choose maths for the fact that girls are good at chemistry(rote learning) and weak at physics and maths (i.e. Hardly true. Its because they are not as devoted as boys and to be successful you have to work hard and love and live your problems whether you are a boy or a girl) and they have less competition for earning a decent post and income of a Maths professor or lecturer. Even what I have seen in my femlae lecturers is that either they are not upto the mark or they can’t expalin what they know or they are no more interested in the subject. Their life mostly revolves around their family, clothes,rings and kids. But things are changing by a tending to zero rate(ending on a positive note).