Tue 2 May 2006
Diana Davis ‘07 reports this math conversation:
Brian: Have you ever actually encountered any obstacles as a female in math?
Me: Well, this one time I was walking to math class, and I tripped over my second x chromosome.
Brian: That’s what I thought.
Funny and true, although Diana’s feminist friends would no doubt accuse her of false consciousness and of giving comfort to the patriarchy.
Those interested in a more formal demonstration of why Larry Summers had reason to believe that forces beside discrimination might have had something to do with the under-representation of women on the math and engineering faculty at Harvard should check out La Griffe du Lion.
But a lot of good that did for Summers . . .
4 Responses to “Math is Hard”
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Mr. Summers, despite his great intellect by conventional measure, was too dumb to appreciate what the typical street kid instinctively knows - namely, that in common human intercourse emotion trumps reason every time. And the Corporation was too dumb to understand the extent of his shortcoming when it selected him.
2 points (salient?):
1. “false conciousness and of giving [aid] and comfort to the patriarchy.” This phrase doesn’t work without “aid,” which is part of the traditional formulation of treason.
2. Ms. Davis, like all human females, only has one X chromosome active in her cells. The second X is deactivated to control the levels of X-based expression which would otherwise be too high.
I wouldn’t be too quick to generalize about hurdles to women in mathematics from Diana’s experience. Williams is great and nurturing, but graduate school can be an entirely different ballgame. At Yale I encountered a handful of female mathematics graduate students with horrific tales of slights and discrimination. I asked some male colleagues and they confirmed the stories (some with, “yeah, it is a shame” and others with “we all know that women can’t perform abstract thinking at as high a level as men”).
I recall seeing a working paper a few years ago concerning evidence of gender discrimination in academic hiring. I have no idea if it was published anywhere. The analysis was pretty straightforward, regress tenure and placement on number of articles, journal rankings, and citation counts. The analysis was separated by gender. The authors found no evidence of gender discrimination in the biological sciences, weak evidence in chemistry, but substantial evidence in mathematics. But I can’t recall anything else about the paper (e.g., who it is by or how the data was collected), so it is little better than an anecdote.
Still, Diana’s quip doesn’t provide evidence either way.
Diana’s testimony is just one person’s tale, but it is still valuable.
Anyone who believes that, in a world without slights or discrimination, women would be 50% of the math faculty at Harvard is, to my mind, in the same category as those who believe that slights and discriminations are the only reason that Asian runners are underrepresented in the 100 meter dash in the Olympics.
I have no doubt that some women are slighted and discriminated against, but it is very hard to believe that this is the entire explanation. Diana’s story reinforces my prior.