Interview: Authors of the paper “Women’s Representation in Mathematics Subfields”

Right now, you can read a preliminary draft of a paper analyzing women’s representation in subfields of mathematics. The abstract:

We use data from papers posted to the Mathematics section of the arXiv to explore the representation of women in mathematics research. We show that women are under-represented as authors of mathematics papers on the arXiv, even in comparison to the proportion of women who hold full-time positions in mathematics departments. However, some subfields have much greater participation than others.

The authors, Dr. Abra Brisbin and Dr. Ursula Whitcher, are both scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Eau Claire. I interviewed Dr. Whitcher about their methodology, findings, and further hypotheses, and about the additional burden of doing diversity work in the sciences.

Quick hit: Maryam Mirzakhani wins the Fields Medal

CC-BY-SA 3.0 image by Ehsan Tabari

The Fields Medal is the highest award in the field of mathematics. Some people have called it the math equivalent of the Nobel Prize, though it’s not a perfect analogy since Fields medalists must be younger than 40 years old. Fifty people received the Fields Medal between 1936 and 2010 (the award is given every four years to between two and four mathematicians). All of them were men.

Today, Stanford math professor Maryam Mirzakhani (born in 1977) became the first woman, and the first person of Iranian descent, to win the Fields Medal. (It was also awarded to Artur Avila, Manjul Bhargava, and Martin Hairer.) Her work lies in the intersection of geometry, topology, and dynamical systems.

You can read more about Dr. Mirzakhani in a profile of her by Erica Klarreich:

Mirzakhani likes to describe herself as slow. Unlike some mathematicians who solve problems with quicksilver brilliance, she gravitates toward deep problems that she can chew on for years. “Months or years later, you see very different aspects” of a problem, she said. There are problems she has been thinking about for more than a decade. “And still there’s not much I can do about them,” she said.

Mirzakhani doesn’t feel intimidated by mathematicians who knock down one problem after another. “I don’t get easily disappointed,” she said. “I’m quite confident, in some sense.”

Prepping for April Fool’s Day linkspam

The photo has nothing to do with the title, except that we are the lamp of knowledge and truth and anti-sexism shining into the dark corners of ignorance! Or maybe not. Anyway, linkspam:

• Haley Mlotek learns to make a WordPress site through Ladies Learning Code and discusses her experience and the organization’s implicit feminism.
  

  I’d assumed Ladies Learning Code was a feminist organization because of my own feminist bias. But it was also because of the language used. The words “empowering” and “democratic” were thrown around a lot; the phrase “even the playing field” was evoked more than once. Everyone talked about a commitment to equality. I took for granted that we were all speaking the same language….

• “In 2011 three young women swept the top prizes of the first Google Science Fair. At TEDxWomen Lauren Hodge, Shree Bose and Naomi Shah described their extraordinary projects — and their route to a passion for science.”
• Speaking of science fairs, here’s one Intel Science Competition semifinalist: a young female biologist studying mussels in marshes.
• The High Visibility project “is collecting the stories of women in technology…. This project emerged from chats among the students, teachers and other women involved with Girl Develop It Columbus.”
• “Affirmative action for women in math contests boosts participation without dropping results”, says a new report.
• Dan Shapiro’s “Startup dudes: Cut the sexist crap” does what it says on the tin.
• Sigh Geeklist, sigh Sqoot.
• Marco at Not Rich Yet: “What’s the Big Deal?”, reflecting on sexism, racism and privilege in light of recent sexist incidents such as the Geeklist item above.
• Controversy about a homophobic post that appeared on the Mozilla project’s Planet (blog aggregator):
  • Al Billings, Supporting an Open Mozilla
  • Christie Koehler on “The (Overdue) Need for Community Conduct Standards at Mozilla”
  • Mitchell Baker and others, discussion on Mozilla’s governance mailing list about community standards and a draft code of conduct for Mozilla.
• “Women in physics: A tale of limits”: “A newly completed survey of 15 000 physicists worldwide reveals that women physicists still do not have equal access to the career-advancing resources and opportunities enjoyed by their male colleagues.”
• The archives of Europe’s first female professor, Laura Bassi, will soon be available online.
• Women are more likely to buy three out of the four top consumer electronics.
• “Diversity in practice: How the Boston Python User Group grew to 1700 people and over 15% women” (video, 41 minutes) starring Asheesh Laroia and Jessica McKellar of OpenHatch.
  

  How do you bring more women into programming communities with long-term, measurable results? In this talk we’ll analyze our successful effort, the Boston Python Workshop, which brought over 200 women into Boston’s Python community this year. We’ll talk about lessons learned running the workshop, the dramatic effect it has had on the local user group, and how to run a workshop in your city.

• “In 1943, Euphemia Lofton Haynes became the first ever black woman to receive a PhD in mathematics, at the age of 53.”  A Pi Day celebration.
• “Some things to think about before you exhort everyone to code”: Miriam Posner reminds other digital humanities professionals that there are structural obstacles to women getting tech skills.
• Results from the Women and Wikipedia survey 2011.
• Empathy and community: “You’re making someone else’s life worse because you don’t want to make the smallest change to your own.”
• “I hate feeling like this – like being me is somehow a hindrance to my career.” From “You’re not like the rest, and that is okay – Letter to My Young self” by DNLee.
• Feminism and hackerspaces.
• I will not learn Rails:
  

  “I’m certainly not against using the right technology for the job. But Rails is no longer the only framework of its type, and if I have a choice, I’d rather not be part of a community which seriously thinks dick jokes are hilarious.”

• Dr. Jennifer Widom, Chair of the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, discusses crafting and teaching her fall intro to databases class, which about 60,000 students took online. “A particularly noteworthy student named Amy became an absolute folk hero: Over the duration of the course Amy answered almost 900 posted questions.”
• The GNOME Outreach Program for Women: deadline for application, April 6.
• A sad farewell to astrophysicist Susan Niebur, and to veteran astronaut Janice Voss.

You can suggest links for future linkspams in comments here, or by using the “geekfeminism” tag on delicious or pinboard.in or the “#geekfeminism” tag on Twitter. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links.

Re-post: How does biology explain the low numbers of women in computer science? Hint: it doesn’t.

In anticipation of a December/January slowdown, we’re reposting some older writing for the benefit of new (and nostalgic!) readers. This piece originally appeared on Oct 17, 2009.

It comes up a lot in discussions of women in computer science, women who write code, women in open source. Eventually, someone brings up the fact that women score slightly lower on math tests. Clearly, they claim, this biological inferiority must explain why there are fewer women in math heavy fields.

It sounds like a compelling reason, and it gets a lot of play. Except, you know what? It’s a lie.

I’m a mathematician. I’ve looked at those numbers, I’ve read some papers. The research into biologically-linked ability is fascinating, but it simply isn’t significant enough to explain the huge gender gap we see in the real world. I used to do this presentation on the back of a napkin for people who tried to spout this misconception to my face, and I finally put it online:

How does biology explain the low numbers of women in CS? Hint: it doesn't.

View more presentations from Terri Oda.

Love it? Hate it? Learn something? Catch the Mathnet reference? Let me know.

Re-posting notes: one of the most common complaints about this slideshow was that the graphs aren’t perfect. You may wish to read this comment about the design choices I made when preparing this slide show. I periodically toy with the idea of putting together a follow-up presentation including some more recent research ideas regarding what causes the gap (e.g. recent research into stereotype threat) so if you have recent links to neat ideas, please pass them along!

Vi Hart’s Math class doodles

Despite the fact that I grew up to earn a degree in mathematics, I remember math classes in my elementary school as pretty much the dullest subject on earth. Which is probably one of the reasons I love Vi’s doodles so much. Experiencing mathematics through doodling while bored seems way more fun than paying attention did. Here’s a video of binary tree and fractal doodles:

Check out the other neat stuff (including more in the doodle series) at vihart.com.

Quick hit: Women = Men when it comes to math skills

Females Are Equal to Males in Math Skills, Large Study Shows

These studies, all published in English between 1990 and 2007, looked at people from grade school to college and beyond. A second portion of the new study examined the results of several large, long-term scientific studies, including the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

In both cases, Hyde says, the difference between the two sexes was so close as to be meaningless.

But despite these findings, we still may be a ways away from the day when I can quit doing back of the napkin demonstrations about gender and math ability:

The idea that both genders have equal math abilities is widely accepted among social scientists, Hyde adds, but word has been slow to reach teachers and parents, who can play a negative role by guiding girls away from math-heavy sciences and engineering. “One reason I am still spending time on this is because parents and teachers continue to hold stereotypes that boys are better in math, and that can have a tremendous impact on individual girls who are told to stay away from engineering or the physical sciences because ‘Girls can’t do the math.'”

(Read the rest of the article here.)

Girl, it’s time to automate (Open Thread)

A friend of mine works in a biology lab working on cell motility and breast cancer research, and a while back she shared this amusing piece of marketing:

Biology equipment boy band! And it’s actually a surprisingly catchy tune.

Math also seems to inspire some entertaining music. For example, the “Finite Simple Group (of Order Two)”.

Got any other math and science related videos to share? Or anything else? This is an open thread, so feel free to discuss older threads, threads you’d like to see, links you’d like to share, or whatever else strikes your fancy.

Linkspams don’t have what it takes (15th August, 2010)

• Alice Adams writes about What women want and how not to give it to them, which includes a list of things companies do that cause their attempts at hiring more women to be ineffective.
• Chantaal wrote to xbox live to downgrade her own account. The xbox customer service response assumes she’s asking on her nonexistent son’s behalf. Others say they’ve had similar issues.
• SMBC tackles the ‘why so few women in math’ issue.
• Rocket nerd Cicutae writes:
  

  “Do you have any questions Sir?” The response was almost always the same – a glance at me, a cursory “Yeah.”, and then they would turn to one of my male colleagues and direct the question to one of them.

  I don’t blame my co-workers. They clearly know far more about the rocket than I do. I mean, they have penises. All I have is the fact that I was the one who designed the damn rocket. *sigh*

• HP’s CEO has stepped aside after he was found to have “breached its Standards of Business Conduct” in circumstances surrounding events that led to him being cleared of involvement in “the sexual harassment of a contractor”.
• A professor at University of Colorado’s Business School says that:
  

  Attractive women were discriminated against when applying for jobs considered “masculine” and for which appearance was not seen as important to the job. Such positions included titles like manager of research and development, director of finance, mechanical engineer and construction supervisor.

• Sometimes, you get what you’ve asked for when ordering “girls” shirts.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

Stompy Boots Linkspam, 12 February 2010

• From the subverting stereotypes file: In an interview with Sherry Turkle, Christine Alvarado credits playing with My Little Pony for fostering her love for mathematics… (edit: was Christine, not Sherry as I originally published. oops, sorry!)
• … And JJ explains how playing with Barbies keeps the boys at bay.
• (slightly NSFW) A computer mouse shaped like a vagina, and from the same designer menstrual pad shelves and a tampon USB drive. Amusing, but the former seems like it could reinforce the wrong ideas somewhere along the lines. What do you think?
• FOSDEM was last weekend. In related news some folks really can’t grasp simple concepts.
• After a discussion on the topic at She’s Geeky, Sarah Dopp discusses gender in forms and offers some advice.
• Signalboost: The GNOME project’s outreach programme for women contributors is kicking off for the second time. The first was back in 2006.
• Two fortnights’ worth of juicy feminist reading up at Feminist Carnivals No 12 and No 13. As always, submit this fortnight’s goodness for the next carnival.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

Linkspam may learn math anxiety, 8 February 2010

• Girls may learn math anxiety from female teachers. Not a new theory, just updated research. One of the researchers says, “It’s actually surprising in a way, and not. People have had a hunch that teachers could impact the students in this way, but didn’t know how it might do so in gender-specific fashion.”
• Via commenter Denise Paolucci, Geeks Drive Girls out of Computer Science. Because stereotypes are endless fun!
• Applications are open for the L’Oreal Women in Science fellowships. If you don’t mind being funded by a makeup manufacturer. Also see stemming.org, a gathering place for “women and girls interested in science, technology, engineering, and math—at any level.”
• Bao Phi talks about being a nerd of color.
• Dana Oshiro of ReadWriteWeb collects interviews explaining why we need tech events for women.
• An interview with Rebecca Skloot about her book on Henrietta Lacks, a tissue sample from whom has been vital to considerable medical research, and whose story raises serious questions about research ethics.
• Restructure! suggests that some undesirable male behavior in IT may be tied to male geeks’ perception that they are low-status.

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism” to bring them to our attention. Please note that we tend to stick to publishing recent links (from the last month or so).

Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.