In the July-August AWM Newsletter, President Keyfitz outlines the
difficulties involved in obtaining appointments for women on key
prize-awarding committees.  We would like to add that even when women
are appointed to important decision-making bodies, they may not
be able to advance the careers of highly deserving women.  As women who
have served on committees, we have observed that it is quite easy
for other members of the committee to deny the quality of a woman
mathematician and quickly dismiss her from the discussion. A single
outspoken committee member bent against women can seriously
hinder the possibilities of awarding a woman an honor which isn't
shared by 5 or 6 men as well.  Even well-intentioned
colleagues often don't realize how their unconscious small assumptions
accumulate to become heavy drags on women mathematicians.  This
can affect both the writing and the interpretation of letters of
nomination, as well as committee discussions.  Even women
mathematicians may fall within this group.

It is imperative that the AWM address these concerns or women will lose
the gains we've made over the past 30 years.  We need to demand that
men and women condemn openly sexist statements without waiting for
someone to be bold enough to file a lawsuit.  We need everyone to watch
themselves for their own subtle biases.  We need to educate people
about writing strong letters that will survive reading by even the most
biased committee members.  If committees are more likely to choose a
woman when they are also choosing five men, then we need more prizes
awarded to multiple recipients.  We need to stop the downward spiral
caused by judging mathematicians based on a lack of prestigious
positions, plenary addresses, top notch publications and awards,
without ever pausing to examine their research directly.

This does not even address the issues that may uniquely affect women
who are parents: the publication gaps and the temporary inability to
travel.  There is almost no funding to help such women recover their
research programs.  Certainly there is no funding available from the
NSF that will allow them to work part-time in research-only positions
at their home institutions like many top women mathematicians did in
the past.  Given the societal pressure to work even with a young child,
few women mathematicians today even take unpaid leaves for childcare.
Instead they work fulltime jobs often keeping up their teaching and
service while their research is forced to the backburner.  It is time
to provide grants, even small ones, which will allow women to recover
their research after children or to keep their research going while
having young children around.  It is time for universities to offer
50% pay for 50% work.  It is time that committees realize that many
parents with doctorates a decade ago may have only been doing research
for eight of those years if not fewer.

There are also the solved two body problems which often place women
at second tier jobs with higher teaching.  Rather than holding the lack
of prestige against the women, it should be noted that her important
results have more weight for having been completed in what may have
been a less than supportive environment.   What would she have done at
a top notch department with time granted to complete research?
What could she do now if offered funding or a top notch position?

Finally the AWM might attempt to spread the word as to which top notch
jobs are truly top notch for women and which have such incipient sexism
as to prevent the women there from succeeding.  Sexism at times can be
so pervasive that it is more of a distraction from mathematics than
teaching, service and childcare combined.  When the only recourse is to
file a lawsuit, there is really no recourse at all.

Anyone with ideas for effective action is encouraged to post them at
the "Effective Action for Women in Math Webforum" at
http://groups.google.com/group/WomeninMath

Sincerely,

Stephanie Alexander
Jean Taylor
Karen Uhlenbeck

THE BEST PERSON TO PROMOTE A WOMAN IS A
TOP MATHEMATICIAN IN HER SUBFIELD:

I'd like to add that when I serve on committees, as a relatively junior
mathematician, I have had some serious difficulty promoting women.  In
fact, the woman most likely to be judged highly  were those who were
nominated or promoted by a senior mathematician in her own subfield.
In this respect it seems that to best serve women, one does not place a
woman of my status on the committee just to have a woman but rather be
sure to appoint a few key senior men who are willing to promote
deserving women.

IT SEEMS BEST NOT TO COMPARE A
WOMAN DIRECTLY WITH A MAN:

Yet even then the person promoting the woman needs to be careful.  It
seems to be treated as a grievious offense if the woman being judged
is compared directly with a man, to the extent that either a committee
member in his subfield feels it is necessary to defend the man against
this dishonor or a committee member who know nothing about his
mathematics decides to discredit him altogether.  This puts one in an
awkward position when one is trying to promote both a woman
mathematician and a man of similar ranking.  Instead it seemed more
effective to describe a woman mathematician as comparible to say a
young Karen Uhlenbeck rather than causing strife between the sexes.  I
mention this as it might help readers who are in the position of
promoting women.

TO HELP A SPECIFIC WOMAN MATHEMATICIAN
MAKE HER WORK KNOWN TO SENIOR MATHEMATICIANS
AND ASK THEM TO PROMOTE HER:

Another effective technique that I've used to promote a woman
mathematician is to directly contact senior mathematicians in her
subfield and ask them to promote her.  I begin by emailing them asking
their opinion of her recent research, often providing a link to an
arxiv posting.  Then I ask if they might invite her to speak at a
seminar or conference.  I have also done this for young men
mathematicians who seem deserving.  I am happy to say that the people
I've contacted have often been very positive and receptive.
Occasionally I have been informed that the research is not as good as I
thought it was, and I welcome such an honest response.

OF COURSE PROMOTE YOURSELF

And, of course, promote your own work by submitting it to top journals
and writting introductions that place it in context as an important
result.  Create a webpage for yourself highlighting your research,
including descriptions and/or abstracts as well as links to articles.
Send your latest work to seminar and conference organizing committees.
Go to speak to senior mathematicians privately to discuss your work and
ask for suggested future directions of research.  I find senior
mathematicians are often impressed by solutions to problems they
propose.  So work on problems of interest to the leaders in the field
as well as those you find interesting.  And fight for time to do that
research!

Christina Sormani

An excellent way to support male and female research mathematicians
with children is to allow research funds to be applied for childcare,
especially during conferences and research visits.  I obtained two
wonderful *unrestricted* summer grants from my home institution the
summer after I began my tenure-track job and the year before I was up
for tenure.  I used both for extended summer travel visits *and* for
daycare, not to mention airline tickets for my son and mathematician
husband.  These were research trips that benefited all of us.

However, once when gets tenure it is a different story.  The internal
grants for tenured faculty must be used for travel expenses only:
childcare and transporting children are not allowable expenses.

On the topic of conferences, I think people have no idea how much one
spends for reliable, safe childcare during such an event.  I just
organized an AMS sectional meeting this weekend and it cost $15 an
hour to hire a babysitter to take care of my one and five year-old.
This is money straight out of my pocket, and cannot be submitted to my
department or the NSF for reimbursement.

1) Some places will provide a travel budget when inviting you to speak
and then you spend as you will without receipts.  I don't think this
can be done with NSF funding, unless possibly it is rolled into an
oversized honorarium/consultant fee, at which point you do start paying
taxes on it.

2) Some people actually brought nannies and au pairs with them to
conferences.

3) Many people had their spouses watch the kids either at home or at
the conference.

4) Some people had child exchanges with colleagues at their home
universities where they left the kids when they travelled in exchange
for watching the colleague's kid when they travelled.

5) Many people left children with grandparents.

Personally I think the best solution is to negotiate a *higher salary*
so that these things are less problematic.  Childcare is essential to
getting research done at home as well as for attending conferences and
you do need a salary high enough to cover it.   At least make sure you
have as high a salary as a guy of equal rank.

I'm in a unionized position which makes it difficult to get a raise,
but my chair recently negotiated that I deserved more "years" of
seniority towards determining my salary.  So even in an underfunded
public university with tiered salaries, raises are possible.  Sometimes
it takes a saavy chair to figure out how this is done.

Note by the way, that invited speakers tend to be catered to much more
than those presenting contributed papers or just attending.  AIM in
particular was very accomodating when I was invited to speak there.  Of
course, there is the question of getting more women invited to speak in
the first place...

 Hi - Christina asked me to send along some information about
funding agencies and childcare costs.

http://www.nsf.gov/attachments/102806/public/ResponseToMPSTheoryWorks...

(in particular,  Please note recommendation C1 on page 10)
Mark also found some other related recommendations by doing a search
under
childcare or child care on the NSF website.

Deborah Lockhart had confirmed in converation in September that these
topics
were discussed somewhere in NSF, but no one knew exactly at which level
the
rules about childcare were set. She said she would like to receive our
communications
about it.

Rachel's posting was good news to me. I am pleased that this very
important  issue is being brought up, especiually within NSF. It was
also mentioned in interviews of a German biology Nobel Prize winner.
I was thinking though that maybe this string should be split - awards
for women tend to go to well established researchers, while childcare
is something we mostly need in our early or mid careers, so we are
talking about two issues that impact women at different points in their
careers.
It seems easier for me to think of ways to help early career women, but
I have trouble coming up with what to do help mid ot top career women
to get recognition in proportion to their merits. I do see that awards
make a huge difference, since departments use them to make themselves
look good with respect to other departments and within the school - if
they can look good thanks to women, they do treat women better, since
the awardees help raise the department's status. This status impacts
many things, including the money departments get from their colleges,
up to the NRC rankings...
It would be great to have more postings concerning how to increase the
number of awards to women - I am so at loss trying to come up with
ideas for this.

Best,

Marianne

I found it fascinating to visit Brazil where the majority of  
mathematicians are women, except in the major institutes.   The women  
told me that they all have full time maids and felt that was the  
reason.  I managed to do research no matter what was going on in my  
life,  but  now that my aged parents are gone and my son is in  
college, I find that I have a tremendous amount of energy and time  
for both research and teaching.   By some miracle, I have not seemed  
to have slowed down mentally and math is pouring out.  This must vary  
a lot, but I expect that other women are experiencing the same  
phenomenon.    There ought to be something like Sloans available for  
the fifty-somethings.

My best to everyone,

Jenny
____________________________________

Jenny Harrison
University of California, Berkeley
851 Evans Hall
Berkeley CA 94720-3270
     Tele: 510-642-9666
     Fax: 510-642-5270
     Email: harri...@math.berkeley.edu
     Web: http://math.berkeley.edu/~harrison/

On Nov 9, 2006, at 8:52 AM, Marianne wrote:

Jenny's idea of awards for senior mathematicians
is a good one even for men.  It seems that the only
senior mathematicians being awarded for top notch
research are those who relocate regularly getting
incentive years of no teaching to entice them to the
new location.  While there may be some advantage
to the movement of mathematicians and a stirring of the
culture, regularly relocating mathematicians put their
graduate students though a lot of difficulty.  So awards
which don't require relocation would be excellent.

On another note, in my field, Riemannian Geometry, getting
a 3yr NSF award when one is already tenured is becoming almost
as competitive as a Sloan.

Christina

When I ran for AMS council last year I had suggested
the creation of top paper awards.  Such awards, which
could consist only of a distinction plus a special mathscinet
review, would go to the young and old alike and would
be for a distinctive paper.  I felt this might resolve
the issue of mathematicians with lots of nonresearch
responsibilities who still occasionally produce a star
paper.

The idea had been to have the papers nominated by the editors
of the journal they appeared in and then reviewed by panels
of experts in the field.  I had originally suggested 1000
papers a year, as that seemed to be at the level where the
top journals in each field would have the majority of their papers
recognized.  But a more selective award could be considered, or a
multitiered system. A multitiered system would take little extra
effort on the part of the nominators and panelists, since it is
really not much harder to rank the top 20% than the top 5% and often
panels do exactly this as they narrow down their decision anyway.

I was not elected and so I feel such an award was not popular
with people.  It may have the same level of suspicion as the
AMS fellows idea: that in certain departments there would be an
expectation that everone get the award.  Of course, the current
situation is that in certain departments everyone is expected to
get an NSF grant before getting tenure.  Such a distinction, however,
is at the whim of federal funding and can become more selective over
time or field specified in a way the mathematics community has no control
over.

Christina Sormani
Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics
CUNY Graduate Center and Lehman College

http://comet.lehman.cuny.edu/sormani

sorm...@comet.lehman.cuny.edu