Strength in Numbers
By ROBIN WILSON
Laboratory on a cool June morning. Five of them, barely
able to keep their seats, take turns applying theorems to prove a
mathematical statement, stopping at each twist in the problem to write the
results on a blackboard.
One of the students, Monique L. Richardson, nods her head. "I feel like
I've got something," she announces, giving a high-five to a student
sitting across the table. "I'm on a roll!"
These young women were among the brightest in their undergraduate math
departments. Two of them have already spent a year in graduate school, and
11 others have been accepted to graduate programs this fall at places like
Rice University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Maryland at
College Park. For them, this month at Pomona is unique: It is likely to be
the last time in their mathematical careers that they are surrounded by
other women.
They are here because the number of women who eventually become
mathematicians is astonishingly low. Only a small proportion even makes it
to graduate school, and many of those few soon drop out.
Professors estimate that at least 50 percent of the students who enroll in
math Ph.D. programs never earn degrees. Women in the field are
particularly at risk: In 2002, 42 percent of the undergraduate mathematics
majors in the country were women, but only 31 percent of those who earned
Ph.D.'s in math that year were women, according to the American
Mathematical Society. And only 13 percent, or 127, of those who earned
doctorates were female U.S. citizens. In the professoriate, in 2000 only
17 percent of those tenured in math at four-year institutions were women.
Over the past 25 years, a profusion of programs has tried to turn the
numbers around by helping girls and undergraduate women feel comfortable
in the male-dominated field.
The women here are part of a four-week boot camp called EDGE--Enhancing
Diversity in Graduate Education--sponsored by the National Science
Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Aimed at helping women
survive graduate school in mathematics, it is believed to be the only math
program designed for women who have already received college degrees. The
program continues to counsel them throughout graduate school.
The two professors who started EDGE, six years ago, believe that such
follow-up is crucial. At their own colleges, they have often encouraged
bright young women to pursue degrees in mathematics, only to see them
flounder in graduate school. "These students had been stars, and they'd
go to graduate school and fall through the cracks," says Rhonda J. Hughes,
a professor at Bryn Mawr College who created the summer program with
Sylvia T. Bozeman, a professor at Spelman College. "They would just
disappear."
Mentors in the program, says Ms. Hughes, have prevented many casualties by
keeping in contact with students throughout graduate school: fielding
mathematical questions, boosting students' confidence, and sometimes
running interference when one has trouble.
"Rhonda makes sure nobody runs us over," says Patricia C. Picardo, who is
in graduate school at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The EDGE program reached a milestone last month when one of its
participants, at Dartmouth College, became the first in the group to earn
a Ph.D. Two others are poised to earn their doctorates in the next year or
so.
But the program's results have been mixed. Of the 50 women who have
attended EDGE sessions since 1998 and have enrolled in doctoral programs,
14 have stopped at master's degrees, and 5 have dropped out of graduate
school entirely.
With all of the programs to help girls and young women consider careers in
math, why are the numbers of those who earn graduate degrees still so low?
Getting Women Out There
Lenore Blum, now a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon
University, was one of the pioneers of math programs for women. In 1976,
she helped begin Expanding Your Horizons, a series of one-day, hands-on
math workshops for middle-school girls. They are now held across the
country.
In 1991, she helped start one of the first math programs for female
undergraduates, the Summer Mathematics Institute, which moved from Mills
College to the University of California at Berkeley in 1994 and ended in
1997.
All of those programs work, says Ms. Blum. "We've known what to do for 30
years," she says, ticking off the key features: "Getting a critical mass
of girls or women together to do math, making math a positive experience,
and having networking and mentorship."
But even successful programs come and go, depending on the federal
government's willingness to sponsor them. "There hasn't been sustained
funding," says Ms. Blum. Instead, she adds, the National Science
Foundation has been "pouring money into studies on why there aren't women
in math."
Educators should take a cue from what Title IX did for female athletes,
she argues. "In sports, people say: 'Just have a program. Get girls out
there.'" The same is true in math. "Nothing works like getting them out
there, together and doing math. You don't have to have a study" to find
out why there aren't more women in math departments.
Robion C. Kirby, a math professor at Berkeley, notes that women have
flocked to fields like medicine and law instead of math. It is tempting,
he says, to blame the male culture of mathematics: "There is the thought
that these mathematicians still haven't learned they've got to treat women
right." But "I don't think that's true," he says, arguing that sometimes
female graduate students are admitted to graduate programs in which they
don't belong.
"At Berkeley, we've probably increased by 50 percent the number of women
graduate students who come here," he says. "When we get somebody who
would not be admitted under normal procedures, she might have gone to
another university, where they have courses that move slower and there is
more basic first-year material." At Berkeley, he says, she's bound to feel
frustrated and possibly drop out.
All Math, All The Time
It is 7:30 on a Thursday morning, and a handful of women are in the lounge
on the second floor of Millikan, doing homework problems that they hadn't
finished the night before. The EDGE students typically gather in the
lounge before class for a breakfast of fruit and bagels. They eat most of
their meals together, and are often up until midnight in their dormitory,
reviewing class notes and problems.
The program's three graduate-student mentors live there, too, and are
always around to help. Even the jokes tend to be math-related. (You
probably haven't heard the one about the mathematician, the biologist, and
the statistician who go squirrel hunting.)
Classes start at 9 a.m. There's an hour and a half of abstract algebra or
real analysis, followed by a problem-solving session, during which the
students work in small groups. The classes are similar to those that
students are likely to take during their first year of graduate school,
and so is the
pace.
"They overwhelm you here, because they expect that you will be overwhelmed
in grad school," says Chandra L. Erdman, who was in the EDGE program last
summer and came back for a refresher this year after earning her master's
degree in statistics from Columbia University. She's headed to Yale
University to start work on her Ph.D. in the fall.
This is the first summer that the EDGE sessions haven't been held at Bryn
Mawr or Spelman. Ms. Hughes and Ms. Bozeman wanted to acknowledge the
program's growing national reputation by moving it across the country.
Forty-five women applied for this summer's 13 slots.
Each of the participants receives a $2,000 stipend for the month, plus
$900 to buy books and travel to academic meetings during graduate school.
Ami Radunskaya, an associate professor of math at Pomona, coordinated the
program this summer. While other math programs for women focus on "fun
stuff," like chaos theory or encryption, EDGE is centered on the basics,
she says. "The math we do is very fundamental," says Ms. Radunskaya. Ms.
Hughes says EDGE emphasizes mathematical proofs that "hold together and
will stand up to careful scrutiny at the graduate level."
The classes have put some of the students at ease about what they will
face this fall. "My analysis is weak," says Kathryn Zuhr, who is headed to
the University of Wisconsin at Madison. "But this reminded me that I
actually know how to do problems. I'm not going to go into my
graduate-level analysis class andjust die."
Isolation and Failure
The female math instructors and graduate-student mentors here act as role
models. Ms. Hughes and Ms. Bozeman have been careful to choose women from
different backgrounds -- about of half the students, instructors, and
mentors here are black, Hispanic, or Asian.
One of the instructors, Gloria C. Hewitt, is an emeritus professor of math
at the University of Montana. When she earned her Ph.D., in 1962, she was
the just the fourth African-American woman in the country to do so. She
encourages the women here to ask questions during her course on abstract
algebra, and even to argue with her when they disagree -- something she
knows will help them challenge male professors later on.
EDGE tries to prepare students for the isolation and sense of failure they
may well encounter in graduate school. Naiomi Cameron, an African-American
instructor here, talks about the "shock" she felt on her first day of
graduate school at the University of Maryland at College Park, in 1995.
"There were so many people just ripping through all of this material," she
remembers. Her reaction was: "I've got to do all of this myself." But
shutting out other students was not the answer.
"Mathematics is 50 percent working with the door closed on a problem, but
the other half is discussing it with other people," says Ms. Cameron, who
earned her Ph.D. in 2002 and will start her first tenure-track job, at
Occidental College,in the fall.
Convincing women that they belong in a male-dominated field is a tricky
matter. For a woman who is already feeling out of place and overwhelmed,
sometimes all it takes to put an end to a graduate-school career is one
discouraging comment from a professor.
It happened to a fellow graduate student of Ms. Radunskaya's at Stanford
University. When the woman went to a professor for help, he told her, "Not
everyone belongs here," recalls Ms. Radunskaya. "She burst into tears and
never came back."
Mr. Kirby, at Berkeley, says he finds it hard to believe that professors
make such comments anymore. Still, he says, "the question is why one or
two comments make such a big deal. You just have to sort of forget that
and move on."
Karoline P. Pershell, an EDGE student, is used to being surrounded by men.
She rode bulls in college rodeo competition while an undergraduate at the
University of Tennessee at Martin. But she wonders whether she is "cut out
to be a mathematician," someone she pictures as "a really nerdy-looking
guy." She admits to thinking: "I don't read math magazines at night. Maybe
math is not my thing."
Ms. Radunskaya calls this "the impostor's syndrome." She adds: "We tell
the students here over and over again, 'We believe that because you all
got accepted to graduate school, you can succeed.'"
Making young women feel comfortable is apparently not a strong point of
most graduate programs in mathematics. "So often students get totally
ignored," says Ms. Bozeman. "Faculty don't give much attention to any
student until they know that student is there to stay."
EDGE tries to help by finding at least one professor in each student's
graduate program who will be her mentor. The program's founders themselves
stay in close contact with each student after she completes the summer
program.
It's not unusual for Ms. Bozeman to drive a few hours from Spelman to meet
a graduate for lunch. Sometimes that can make all the difference.
Ms. Hughes recalls one former participant who "started a graduate program
and had a huge crisis of confidence." When Ms. Hughes spoke to the
student's mentor, however, she learned that the young woman was doing fine
in class. "The professor called her in and said, 'You belong in this
program.' She was like a new woman. Now she's close to finishing."
'Endurance Test'
Predicting which students will succeed and which won't is not easy. "It is
not the best student who gets through -- it is the one with the inner
strength," says Ms. Hughes.
Dorea Claassen, who was in the EDGE program last summer, just finished her
first year of graduate school at Boston University. "This is by far the
most stressful year I've had in my life," she says. On top of her course
work, she spent 20 to 30 hours a week studying for her qualifying exams --
something that all graduate math students must pass to advance. "Most of
the time, I feel like I can do it, but then there are the times when it
just seems too hard," says Ms. Claassen. "It's an endurance test."
Some students, even with help from EDGE, just don't make it. Shylynn
Loften, who attended the program in the summer of 1998, lost her father to
cancer after one semester in graduate school at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst, and never went back. Eventually she enrolled at
Wayne State University, earning a master's degree in 2002. She now teaches
high-school math in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Even if her father hadn't died, Ms. Loften isn't sure she would have
lasted at UMass. "Once I got there, I knew it wasn't a place I wanted to
be for six years," she says.
One experience in particular stands out in her memory. After the second
week of classes, she visited a professor during his office hours. "I asked
a couple of questions, and then I asked a couple more. He said, 'Listen, I
really don't have time to help you. If this is too hard for you, perhaps
you should drop the class.'"
Ms. Lofton ended up "bombing" the final exam, she says, and taking an
incomplete for the course.
Not all of the students here are comfortable with the idea that they might
need special help in mathematics just because they're female. "I've
traditionally scorned women-only math programs, because they're not
representative of the mathematical world at large," says Naomi Utgoff, who
graduated from Brandeis University last spring and is headed to graduate
school at the University of Pennsylvania this fall. She wonders whether
programs like EDGE are "kind of unfair" to men.
Math Girlfriends
Still, a little female bonding with mathematics buddies can't hurt. One
afternoon, the EDGE students put their studies aside and took an hour's
drive to Hollywood, and through the streets of Beverly Hills -- past Rodeo
Drive and Sunset Boulevard. They looked like any other tourists, hanging
out the windows to shoot pictures and calling each other on cellphones
from car to car.
Math came up hardly at all during dinner in Santa Monica, where the
students chowed down on hamburgers, cheese-steak sandwiches, and French
fries. Some even sneaked out for a few minutes and caught the lingerie
sale down the street at Victoria's Secret.
"I would have only one math girlfriend if I hadn't come here," says Farrah
M. Jackson, a mentor who is in graduate school at North Carolina State
University. She was an EDGE student herself in 1999. With math
girlfriends, she says, you can go to the movies or the mall. "You don't
have to talk about math. But you can if you need to."
Networking With Numbers
Over the years, a number of special programs have been developed to help
women in mathematics. Some have survived, some haven't. In addition to
EDGE, sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation, these are the major programs now being offered:
- Program
for Women in Mathematics
Sponsored by Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced
Study
"Many female students and young researchers have encountered
discrimination in certain situations and have concerns about entering a
field with few senior women visible," says the program's Web site. "Often
women have not had the opportunity to work with other serious women in
their profession or listen to more than an occasional lecture or course
given by a woman."
This program brings together women at all levels of mathematics --
undergraduate juniors and seniors, graduate students, and professors --
for two weeks each summer. This year's theme was mathematical biology.
Participants attend courses, lectures, and seminars, and get lodging,
meals, and transportation to and from the institute.
- Summer Program
for Women in Mathematics
George Washington University
Sponsored by the National Security Administration
A five-week program designed for 16 undergraduates who have completed
their junior year. The program's Web site says it tries to "communicate an
enthusiasm for mathematics, develop research skills, cultivate
mathematical self-confidence and independence, and promote success in
graduate school."
Students take five courses taught by research mathematicians. They also
visit working female mathematicians -- in universities, businesses, and
government agencies. Each students receives a $1,500 stipend.
- Carleton College
Summer Mathematics Program for Women
Sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the National Security
Administration
A four-week program for 18 women who have just finished their first or
second year of college. The goal is to introduce students to new areas of
mathematics, improve their proof-writing and problem-solving skills, and
increase their awareness of careers in math. Each student takes two
courses and receives a $1,300 stipend.
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