Cracking the Glass Ceiling Wider
ChristinaSormani
glass ceiling: a term I've heard used for women who've broken through
to the next level and, as one of the few women up there, get a lot of
attention. In my case, getting full professor has come hand in hand
with a number of fairly prestigious invitations to speak.
But did I break through the glass ceiling to get here? Not really. I
came up through the cracks made by others. Linda Keen is a full
professor at Lehman College, so we already had a woman who is a full
professor in math. I'm not the first woman to speak at these
conferences either. Most have at least one woman a year, and, thanks
to some of the top women geometers who turn down repeated invitations
to speak again, that one woman is often someone new. So more of us
are coming up through those cracks. But not many.
The glass ceiling has not been shattered. Only a few of us are
successfully rising. Linda Keen has been a full professor since
before I arrived, over ten years ago. Now that I'm a full professor,
we have no young women coming up tenure track. Given the recession,
its unlikely there will be another woman full professor before I'm 50,
ten years from now. At the CUNY Graduate Center, we're doing only a
little better, a few more women at all levels, but again, not really
an increase. We had women in the past. We had women when we
started. We have women now, but mostly we have men.
I do see amazing strides at places like Columbia and Princeton: a
complete turn-around in attitude
with the arrival of a few key top women. There seems to be more of a
hope among young women to go tenure track at a top ten institution and
have a fair chance of getting tenure. These are new cracks that have
been formed that weren't there before. It's really wonderful to see
them.
But what about the rest of the mathematics world? What about the more
ordinary departments that have already had women faculty for many
years? Has it been decided that we are fine? That 10% is a good
number? Are we losing women to the top departments and failing to
seek out others? Are we content with the status quo? Or do we need
to start jumping and shatter that ceiling?
j...@math.columbia.edu
Congratulations on the promotion and on all the invitations!
Best,
Joan Birman
Quoting ChristinaSormani <sorm...@gmail.com>:
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Christina Sormani
ChristinaSormani
Since the mathematics world is so small, it is fairly easy for us to
make a major change just by helping a couple people. Perhaps each of
us could look up some of the women in our fields that we've known over
the years and check how their careers are progressing. Have they
gotten tenure? What about promotion to full professor? Is their
research funded by the NSF? Do they have recent preprints? Contact
them and ask about recent research or old results.
I know I had a bad year or two myself when my research wasn't funded
and I was depressed about it. Having senior mathematicians contact me
to ask me to speak about recent work or to ask if there were any new
results related to prior work made a big difference.
It is very easy to fall out of the research track when you don't have
doctoral students or coauthors or anyone interested in pushing to hear
your latest result. Mathematicians at colleges who already have
tenure may not be encouraged to do research by their departments
anymore. They can get caught up in service: organizing REUs and
engaging in other activities which get attention from a chair or
dean. I'm not saying we should discourage service, but someone needs
to encourage mathematicians to do mathematics. This isn't just a
problem for women, I've seen it happen to men too. Any mathematician
with good organizational skills will be pushed away from mathematics
and into service to their universities.
I've also seen mathematicians stop research as a result of a poor
coauthoring experience or the solving of one of their major research
problems by another party. Such mathematicians need to be steered to
new topics closely related to their prior work. Having a senior
mathematician suggest a problem or a conference or workshop can make a
big difference in this setting, Too often I see mathematicians
drastically switch fields in such a situation but that involves
climbing up from scratch and can be very difficult. Those women I
know who left for industry generally seem quite happy, so I'm not
saying this should be discouraged,
but if we want to keep women in our fields then, out of selfish
reasons, we might make the extra effort to contact them and see that
their research is moving along smoothly.
Of course, there is no reason not to do this for the guys as well.
This isn't necessarily a feminist issue. Certainly most of the
mathematicians who've helped me out along the way have been men.
Generally encouraging senior mathematicians to keep track of people
would benefit the profession as a whole. In some fields this is
standard, and large amorphous research groups form which provide a
network of support. I've been lucky to be included in more than one
network of mathematicians, but some people are left out and need to be
brought back in.
j...@math.columbia.edu
from students, strays of all sorts, and junior faculty too.
One thing that any mathematician can do is to simply respond politely
and substantively to e-mails from mathematicians, women and men (and
often I can't tell because I don't always recognize the sex of someone
from another culture), young or not so young, who write for help
that's related to the mathematics that I know. I tend to get letters,
maybe because I almost always respond. The letter writers often tell
me that "nobody else answered my letter." Without bragging, I do know
that I've really helped some number of women and men that way. Often
the math questions lead to questions such as the ones Christina
mentioned about choosing good research problems, but others are quite
different. One that comes to mind was a request, long ago, for a
suggestion of a gift to an elderly relative who was fascinated by
latin squares! Another was from someone who wanted to donate money to
honor someone who had died, and noticed that I had initiated the
Satter Prize, and wanted advice. (On that one, my part was actually
minimal; the good will of individuals in the AMS made the prize what
it is today.)
The "almost always respond" relates to the high school students whose
teacher tells them to write an essay about a famous woman
mathematician. Questions about my family from strangers feel rude to
me, and have nothing to do with mathematics. While the assignment is
surely well-intentioned, I question the judgment of the teacher. For
the same reason, I dislike the AWM essay contest.
"Cult of personality" is very popular in our culture, but we are
professional mathematicians, and promoting that feels undignified to me.
e-Requests to help high school students who want to do research are
another no-no for me. I just don't have the time, or real interest, in
using my time that way. I try to say no politely and not just delete
the letter.
Requests about admission to grad school are also tricky. I tell the
writer to go to the website for grad admissions. If a college math
student is writing, I say to make sure she/he has the prerequisites,
and then suggest that the student look at the research interests and
papers of the faculty members, to choose a good university. Very often
that will lead to requests about choosing an appropriate university,
and that's when I can start to really help. The letter-writers almost
always think that to be admitted to grad school they need the support
of an individual researcher. That's just not true in my university.
Best,
Joan
Quoting ChristinaSormani <sorm...@gmail.com>:
ChristinaSormani
but most of the time I match people to an appropriate person for
advise or
for mentoring on a project rather than working with them myself. This
is
unless they are interested in my field in particular. There are many
faculty
at colleges who are well equipped to answer students questions better
than I am. Of course I answer the questions of students at CUNY and
in our college now program extensively because I can assess their
math knowledge.
By email, I feel I can give good advise to postdoc and tenure track
mathematicians
and even give out such advise unsolicited. I encourage women to go to
the best
university they get a job at if I hear they've been offered such a
job. It may be
harder to get tenure, but the better universities also support
research more and have
less teaching. I found teaching takes far more time from research
than kids. I'm
also quite willing to discuss kids and having them while tenure track
like I did.
I have collected a variety of parenting approaches from a variety of
mathematicians
and pass on more than just my personal experience. I also tend to
contact any young
mathematician whose work I find interesting on the arxiv and let them
know about
others who might find their results intriguing.
To be honest, people do sometimes get annoyed by unsolicited advise.
One woman was
furious with me when I warned her not to mention her baby when turning
down
the opportunity to speak at a conference. Still I benefitted from
the exact
same advise from a male mentor who pointed out what conference
organizers said about
me when I turned down an offer to speak with a new infant. The fact
is, especially with
the first child, some people will decide your career is over if you
show signs of weakness.
I never hid my kids existence from people but I tried not to mention
to anyone when they
had interfered except insofar as to ask for a conference organizer to
provide a babysitter.
ChristinaSormani
mathematicians
who are no longer in academia but I believe it would be worthwhile to
do so.
if I think of the level talent among women who got their doctorates
when I did,
but have since disappeared, I think it is a great loss to the
mathematics world.
They may be benefitting the rest of the world, but I'll be selfish.
Over the years, I have found women who are at small colleges
and are still google-able and some of these women are interested in
coming back into a more research-oriented environment: especially
those who left the university system for a college due to solving a 2
body problem or thinking it would be easier to "slow down" a career
when having kids. It isn't easier to work at a college: there are
different
demands that take time and little time left for research. Some of
these
women had an amazing research program in the past and with a nice
sabbatical would be well prepared to switch over to a doctoral
program.
Others have maintained a strong research program with endless overtime
for research but would bloom into top notch mathematicians if 60 of
their 80 hour weeks were spent on research rather than only 40. I
strongly
feel there are women who would be worthy of an Abel prize someday if
they
were in the right location for their work to move forward.
Tracking down women who left academia for industry or finance or
no job is now possible with facebook. I do feel we can attract them
back
to mathematics, especially if they are ready for a change and
considering
their options. Finance is definitely higher pressure with far fewer
women
than academia. Industry can be somewhat unstable depending the
economy.
Mathematicians have returned from both and can be ideal for masters
level math courses preparing students for the exact jobs they held.
These people are not hired at the rank they had when they left
academia,
but given an appropriate rank matching their experience and given
the time to restart a publishable research program.
The top departments in this country have been using these methods to
find and recruit women especially those which had no women before.
However,
there is no reason that other universities, like mine, which have
always had
a couple women and still have only a couple women, can't use these
techniques
as well. I think our universities need to work harder to recruit
women, not just
trying to get the latest popular postdoc women but looking for others
who may
have drifted away.
Best,
Christina