New Book: "Women in Mathematics"

The book Women in Mathematics (subtitled "Celebrating the Centennial of the Mathematical Association of America") is now available.

I was able to download it for free at UCLA, so this should also be the case at other universities with similar deals with the publisher (Springer).

Tales from the ArXiv: Visibility of Women in Academic Seminars

This paper presents the results of research on visibility of women in academic seminar question and answer period. Some takeaways include the length of the Q & A period and who asks the first post-seminar question.

Take a look at the data and suggestions, and see what you think.

Math Profs are the Least Boring (And Other Observations from Data Analysis)

Here is some interesting data analysis using reviews from Rate My Professors.

You can see from this data analysis that math professors appear to be the least boring among all professors (yay!) and there are some expected (and perhaps more surprising) gender gaps (boo!) in the reviews.

(Tip of the cap to Nicholas Christakis.)

Data Analysis of Gender in Film Dialog

The data set used in this analysis would be really cool to explore (perhaps in combination with movie networks).

The Largest Ever Analysis of Film Dialogue by Gender: 2,000 scripts, 25,000 actors, 4 million lines https://t.co/QV7NzluIpL pic.twitter.com/ampVQskeAu

— Sinan Aral (@sinanaral) May 26, 2017

Back a Study on Gender Representation on the Editorial Boards of Journals in the Mathematical Sciences

Chad Topaz and Shilad Sen of Macalester College are trying to raise funds for a study on gender representation on the editorial boards of journals in the mathematical sciences. I want to see what the data look like (and ideally that will help the mathematical and scientific communities act to improve the situation), so please join me in backing this study. It's important to collect and analyze these data.

Somerville Mathematics Undergraduates Taking Leadership Roles

Yes, yes they are. And it's especially excellent that they're taking leadership roles on the crucial issue of gender equity in mathematics. Way to go!

Self-Citations of Men Versus Women

According to a new study, male scientists self-cite more than female scientists. One of the authors of the study is Carl Bergstrom, so naturally I am wondering if the paper includes a citation of a Rosvall–Bergstrom paper on community detection.

(Tip of the cap to Oxford Mathematics Good Practice.)

Tales from the ArXiv: "Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Mathematics Conferences"

I am passing along this paper concerning addressing the underrepresentation of women in mathematics conferences, given my very strong agreement with the following sentence from the abstract: We describe in detail the biases against women in mathematics, knowing that greater awareness of them leads to a better ability to mitigate them.

It's a long road, and "awareness" at least ought to be one of the easier parts that can help in tackling these challenges.

Here are some more details about the paper (which, from the text, apparently will be appearing in Notices of the AMS):

Title: Addressing the Underrepresentation of Women in Mathematics Conferences

Author: Greg Martin

Abstract: Despite significant improvements over the last few generations, the discipline of mathematics still counts a disproportionately small number of women among its practitioners. These women are underrepresented as conference speakers, even more so than the underrepresentation of women among PhD-earners as a whole. This underrepresentation is the result of implicit biases present within all of us, which cause us (on average) to perceive and treat women and men differently and unfairly. These mutually reinforcing biases begin in primary school, remain active through university study, and continue to oppose women's careers through their effects on hiring, evaluation, awarding of prizes, and inclusion in journal editorial boards and conference organization committees. Underrepresentation of women as conference speakers is a symptom of these biases, but it also serves to perpetuate them; therefore, addressing the inequity at conferences is valuable and necessary for countering this underrepresentation. We describe in detail the biases against women in mathematics, knowing that greater awareness of them leads to a better ability to mitigate them. Finally, we make explicit suggestions for organizing conferences in ways that are equitable for female mathematicians.


(Tip of the cap to Oxford Mathematics Good Practice​. Why do only 20 people 'like' their Facebook page? The last I checked, our department has many more than 20 people in it.)

Revisiting the Cult of Genius

Thanks to an illuminating Facebook post and discussion by Sara Solla and some e-mail discussion with Puck Rombach, I was reminded of a blog entry I wrote in early 2007. (How is that for a Flashback Friday!) I had my Oxford faculty job waiting at the time, but I hadn't yet started it.

I just reread my entry, and I still agree with myself.

I will add that one of the things that really helped make me understand I could be a successful scientist was in seminars in grad school: there were many really intelligent and successful faculty at Cornell who did amazing work that I admired. When faced with a seminar in which both they and I didn't know the topic, I found that I usually figured things out faster than they did. So even though I didn't have the track record that they did, that was one of the early clear signals that I could be a really successful scientist. (Though there were still many more hurdles to come...)

Also, here is the thought-provoking seminar abstract that Sara posted on Facebook. Please read it.

Three Fascinating Articles

I just read three fascinating articles on CNN.com.

The first one discusses tweeting directly using one's brain to form the letters.

The second discusses differences between men and women with respect to sexual orientation being continuous versus discrete. (There are other things in the article too, but this is what I found most interesting.) Apparently, a bunch of studies are suggesting that it seems to be much more of a continuum in women than in men (and also perhaps that it is more common for a woman to experience a change in location over time).

The third discusses the new Star Trek film. (If you haven't gotten the allusion yet, let's just say that this article is fascinating in a somewhat different manner than the other two.)

"Using Visual Means To Challenge Stereotypes"

I saw a pointer in the December 2006 issue of Physics Today to a PDK poster project about female scientists. There are a series of posters -- some good, some tacky -- meant for a very good purpose, but the implementation is problematic. For one thing, they are rather expensive and the means for people like to teachers to acquire them for discounted prices seem to be down for the moment (which could unfortunately go a long way towards defeating the whole purpose). For another, the website is far less useful than it could be because the biographies of profiled people (which is presumably of direct interest and one of the main points of the whole endeavor) are not right next to the posters about their research. Anyway, the idea is excellent, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. This comes across as a commercial project (not to be cynical, but maybe that was the real intent of this whole thing?) rather than one whose purpose is to benefit society. I think there will be some benefit, but it seems to me that the retarded implementation is really going to kill it---which is a crying shame, because the idea is extremely good. You know, put these posters up in the hallways of high schools and in math, physics, and other departments to show current students what they have the chance to achieve if they work. However, from a practical point of view, I can't see this happening (especially at the high school level) with people already having to fight unmercifully to change their budgets. Because of the website, I could only occasionally figure out who was being profiled with a given poster, and in the case of the mathematicians, I've already heard of many of these people. (For many of them, one also sees just what is being studied and nothing about who did the studying!) In at least one case and presumably two (I assume the wavelet one is about Ingrid Daubechies because there's nobody else about whom it could be, but I couldn't read the small font in the thumbnail), I even know the person being profiled and I couldn't immediately tell without delving deeper into the web page, which most people are simply not going to have the patience to do (again, contributing to defeat the purpose). I did once send one of my students to talk to her (she was on the GT math faculty when I was there) because I felt it was necessary for my student to talk to a female faculty member because there are experiences that I felt needed to be discussed that there's no way I can understand first-hand.

In sum: Awesome idea but asinine implementation. This project could have had a major impact and it probably won't even be a blip on the radar screen as a result. Why aren't the professional science societies taking this where it should go? Some of the people who were profiled have high-ranking positions in those societies.