Why bother?
Disclaimer: The author recognizes their many privileges, including their educational experiences; cisgender and straight identities; and ethnicity, as Asian Americans are proportionally overrepresented in terms of mathematics Ph.D.’s granted. They realize this essay fails to speak on the intersectionality of minority experiences, which is far from negligible. There is more to be said about underrepresented gender identities, the LGBTQA+ community, racial minorities, disabled persons, those who have had limited socioeconomic circumstances or access to educational opportunities, and more.
I
For most of my life, the phrase “woman in STEM” felt more like a joke than a real problem, let alone one that affected me. I should count myself lucky. Both naïveté and academic privilege factored into my blithe ignorance, but in hindsight, what I find most remarkable is the sheer insistence of my unconscious denial.
I spent most of my girlhood attempting to align with traditionally male values, convinced–as are many–that the slights I experienced could be overcome if only I was “different” from other women.
In my final pre-college years, I was consistently the only girl in my math classes; instead of eliciting concern, this made me proud. Instead of questioning what made my underrepresented peers carry such an unwieldy adjective, I thought it was an accomplishment to perform in a field others seemed unable to succeed in. So people joked about me as a “woman in STEM,” and I more or less ignored them, spending my days doing an absurdly poor job at handling my victimhood and concurrent complicity.
II
Here’s a classic story:
1) High-achieving high-school student comes to Yale.
2) They get karmically and academically slapped in the face.
3) Character growth ensues.
This, though common, is a perfectly valid experience–one that helps us all become less insufferable–and is something that happened to me, albeit in a dramatic manner.
During my third semester at Yale, my depression worsened to an all-time low. I dropped to a course under-load, took enough medication to later send me into withdrawal, missed multiple midterms, hallucinated during the exams I managed to take, stopped sleeping, and did not attend another class for the rest of the semester.
It should come as no surprise, then, that I dropped multiple courses and received a D in my remaining math class. I failed the final by a huge margin.
This in itself was not a huge problem. My health had been worsening since senior year of high school, and my transcript at Yale was nothing more than a nice .pdf of monotonically decreasing numbers. Yet, despite clear signs that I was struggling through disabling experiences, the entire semester felt baffling, discouraging, and, above all, like it was my own fault. Each term, Yale Student Accessibility Services would add to my ever-growing list of accommodations; I refused to use them out of guilt.
As my confidence dropped, I became increasingly convinced that I just wasn’t “cut out” for math. I thought anyone who struggled in undergraduate classes should just quit while not-so-ahead. My parents suggested switching to an easier major. I began to avoid math professors whom I thought might recognize me from my poor grades. Unable to concretely explain what was wrong with me, I attached my academic struggles to my identity and related insecurities. I counted the number of femme-sounding names on my classes’ Canvas pages and began to feel very much like a “woman in STEM”.
How difficult it is to recognize the scope of someone’s suffering, even–perhaps especially–if that someone is yourself.
III
But I digress. I am not blogging about discrimination in mathematics to allay my own insecurities.
I write about my experiences to express what a lack of support can evolve into. But there are so many more shapes that damage can take.
It’s easy to think that, beyond hiring female professors and having co-educational universities, our work is done. MIT has an excellent paper (linked here) on why this is completely false, some highlights of which I leave below. The schools surveyed were Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale, and Brown.
“Studies have found that faculty – both men and women – tend to favor men in STEM fields by, for example, being more likely to select them for research positions (Moss-Racusin, 2012). […] A number of other manifestations of unconscious bias in academia have been well documented, such as a tendency to hold women to higher standards and judge them more harshly for opportunities for advancement (Easterly and Ricard, 2011).”
“When studying the gender gap in mathematics undergraduates […] Of particular interest in the Harvard mathematics department is the course Math 55.[…] Five of the last ten semesters (50%) have seen no women enrolled in Math 55. Over the past 5 years, less than 7% (11/163) of the students enrolled in Math 55 have been women.”
“Amongst the 5 schools reported in the previous sections, 50% of female students (from all majors, have taken at least one college mathematics course) reported comments from other students in regards to their gender and mathematics ability of which 91% were reported to have had a neutral or negative effect. ”
The article also lists comments that female students received (quoted below is non-exhaustive):
“You don’t count as a girl because you’re good at math”
“You’re the only girl I know who is good at math”
“She does math AND is hot, it’s crazy”
“Being a female in math is difficult. I will never be as respected as my male peers. Many an occasion occurs when collaborating where my ideas are completely disregarded as the only female in the room until they have exhausted all their ideas and then finally consider it (maybe)”
“You only got this opportunity because you’re a girl”
“I feel alone, increasing the pressure to do well to represent my gender”
“Grad student indicated that he felt that there was no need to be concerned about the number of women in math or to try to encourage more women to take math.
He also stated that he would not mentor a female student in the same way he would mentor a male student because she might falsely charge him with sexual harassment.
When I confided to a professor that I was having difficulty in his class because I didn’t have a study group to work with in an almost exclusively male environment, his response was to tell me that if I wasn’t able to keep up with the class, perhaps I should request a tutor or drop the course in favor of an easier one.
Professor stated that women simply came in with less math preparation in high school, and that there was nothing the university could do to fix that.
Professor insinuated that I might not be good enough at math to do a senior thesis, and that I should instead opt for a senior seminar. Interestingly, the only other people I have found who heard this from him seem to be women.”
“A visiting professor walked through at office hours for my math class and commented how much more attractive girls in math were now than in his day.”
“‘I didn’t finish that pset last week.’ ‘Of course, look who you were working with’ (a group of girls).”
IV
The experiences of myself, my peers, and other secondhand accounts at Yale echo the reports from above, including but not limited to:
There have only ever been two tenured women in the Yale math department, the first of which received tenure in 2013
A consistently small (qualitatively noticeable) proportion of women and gender minorities in math classes
Insinuation from peers that women struggle with math for biological reasons
Insinuation from peers that if a woman succeeds at math, it is an exception rather than something normal
Explicitly saying or implying that women who receive research or job opportunities only did so due to their gender identity
Women in math are unattractive
Making persistent and unwanted advances on women, sometimes to the extent where they feel unsafe going to office hours or class
Female ULAs receiving more requests for help from female students outside of scheduled office hours. Feeling consequent pressure to work outside the regular hours shared with male ULA peers, while being paid the same wage
Male students not listening to female students’ ideas unless validated by another man or except as a last resort
Male students only seeking advice from other men. Noticing crowds or lines to ask men for advice, even when there are women with the same qualifications available to speak nearby
Transphobic comments and actions
And more.
The Yale math department’s Climate Committee is a small group devoted to improving DEIB within the major. However, it isn’t necessarily the most visible organization, and whether or not undergraduates in particular actually feel supported is up for debate. From a 2023 survey on the Yale math department conducted by the Poorvu Center:
“Respondents were split in whether they felt the department is making sufficient effort towards inclusion (57% agreed and 43% disagreed or felt neutral).
A subtle dichotomy emerged in the qualitative data, suggesting much of the department is working towards an improved climate, though a subset of the department does not engage or is perceived as unsupportive towards DEI&B work.”
How much argument is needed to say that 43% is unacceptable? In 2024, how can we continue to convince ourselves that even DEIB–a band-aid solution at best–is too much? And yet, over and over, my peers and I find ourselves being interrogated. Why is DEIB important in mathematics? What do numbers have to do with gender? And aren’t we supposed to value objectivity (read: viewing women as equals is somehow biased and unfair)? What else needs be done, anyways?
In response, I tend to swing between violently gesturing at the overwhelming evidence of persistent discrimination in mathematics and succumbing to sheer exhaustion.
It is difficult and tiring enough to fight for inclusion, let alone justify why the fight is even worthwhile.
Are my words wasted on someone who can’t see what seems so obvious to me? If I gave someone the benefit of the doubt, where would I even start? Or, even worse: what if all my anger and soapboxing simply turns prospective women away from the field?
Thus comes a major caveat of this post: contrary to what this post might have you believe up to this point, mathematics isn’t just one long series of microaggressions. I have made lifelong friends in the math major at Yale and elsewhere. Dimensions cannot fix an issue that is, at its roots, entrenched in patriarchy, but it is an incredible group which has done so much for the community. I am a firm believer that change, no matter how slow, is happening.
V
As I grapple with my time in mathematics–what parts I can and cannot attribute to my identity, what issues are larger than my personal experiences–I’ve become increasingly convinced about the need to be loud. There is, of course, the ever-looming threat of coming off as a hysterical woman, but inclusion in mathematics is everyone’s problem. Firstly, it is undeniable that there is room for the field to progress.
Striving for an equitable, safe, and respectful environment for our peers and coworkers is not “too much.” It is a baseline expression of empathy and social justice.
As mathematicians, we are morally and collaboratively bound to embrace everyone in our field with something to offer.
I think of how lucky I have been, having found support in mentors, friends, and Dimensions; I remember, too, how discouraging it can feel to exist without a support system. How many mathematicians are dissuaded from the field because of discriminatory experiences? From Climate Committee to Dimensions, all I can hope is that I can lessen that number, even if only by one.