February 9, 2010
Chronicle of Higher Education
William Paterson U. Pays $1-Million to Settle Gender-Bias Lawsuit
By Robin Wilson
A lawyer for two female chemists says William Paterson University of New Jersey has agreed to pay more than $1-million to settle a gender-discrimination lawsuit in which the women allege that male professors in their department consistently treated them with "condescension and derision" and ran them out of the university.
The women now have tenure-track jobs on other campuses, but they contend that the discrimination they experienced at William Paterson slowed their careers and made their work lives miserable. A university spokesman said on Tuesday that he could not comment on the allegations or the settlement because "we do not discuss legal matters." But one of the professors who was named in the lawsuit called the charges "unfair."
The two women—Anita J. Brandolini and Amber Charlebois—were hired as tenure-track professors by William Paterson in 2002. According to the women's lawyer, Samuel J. Samaro, the chemistry department had had no other tenured or tenure-track women since the 1990s. The complaint, which was filed in 2007, says that as soon as the two women started working there, two male professors in the department made it known "that they did not respect female scientists and women were not welcome in the department."
The men named in the suit are Gary J. Gerardi, who was chairman of chemistry when the women were hired and has worked at William Paterson since 1977, and Gurdial M. Sharma, a professor of chemistry who has worked there since 1980.
Accusations of Being Silenced
The suit says the men told the women to be quiet or talked over them at meetings and yelled at them in the department's hallways and classrooms. The women also allege that they were denied the ability to vary their own course content, were assigned larger classes than their male colleagues, were denied the instruments they needed to conduct research, and were given clean-up tasks in laboratories that were not assigned to male professors.
When the two women complained to administrators about the men's behavior, administrators sympathized with them, says the complaint, but did nothing to change the situation.
In October of 2005, the university informed Ms. Brandolini that she would not be reappointed the following year. According to Mr. Samaro, the university said Ms. Brandolini was not adept at using instruments in the laboratory and did not do a good job of teaching higher-level courses. Ms. Brandolini left William Paterson and is now an assistant professor of chemistry at Ramapo College of New Jersey.
After Ms. Brandolini was informed that her appointment would not be renewed, Ms. Charlebois filed a complaint with the university in December 2005, alleging that the two men in her department had created a hostile work environment. But nothing changed after she filed the complaint, the lawsuit contends, and Ms. Charlebois left for a tenure-track job at Fairleigh Dickinson University in April 2006. She later received a letter from William Paterson, saying her allegations of a hostile environment were not substantiated.
While Mr. Samaro says the university acknowledged that Professors Gerardi and Sharma could be brusque, he says it argued that the way the two men treated the women had nothing to do with their gender. But in December, says Mr. Samaro, the university agreed to settle the lawsuit by paying each of the women $250,000, and this month it agreed to pay Mr. Samaro $541,000 in lawyer's fees.
In a telephone interview, Mr. Gerardi said the university had told him not to comment on the settlement. "I feel very strongly that I want to explain the situation, because it's very unfair," he said, "but the university feels it's best we don't say anything."
Mr. Sharma did not respond to attempts to contact him.
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
The Academic-Motherhood Handicap
February 12, 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education
The Academic-Motherhood Handicap
By Amy Kittelstrom
One afternoon in the spring of 2005, after coming up dry in my second year of pursuing a tenure-track position, I typed the following words into Google: "female academic second child effect career." My firstborn was about to turn 2, I wanted him to have a sibling, and I needed guidance on this choice.
What Google made clear: Having children can devastate the career prospects of female academics, but the academic profession seems remarkably complacent about this handicap.
Although some research universities have instituted important family-friendly initiatives (which are economically out of reach for the majority of colleges and universities, especially now), even the most well-endowed universities practice hiring and promotion policies that actively—yet not deliberately—discriminate against academic mothers. Should the best-educated people on the planet simply accept unequal career prospects that clash with academics' own stated values of fairness?
Biology is real. Discrimination against academic mothers differs from other forms of discrimination in important ways. Children and "motherhood" have always been celebrated in American culture in ways that members of minority groups, for example, have decidedly not been. No department that I've ever heard of has any official or tacit policy against hiring or promoting mothers, who are often welcome to bring their children to departmental parties or meetings. In fact, academic mothers are treated no differently than academic fathers on this social level.
But that's the problem. Academic mothers are different than academic fathers. The differences are both sex-specific and time-limited, significant only during the intense years of childbearing and early caregiving—the years that matter most for academic careers.
Research by scholars such as Mary Ann Mason at the University of California at Berkeley paints a grim picture. If a woman wants to get hired as an assistant professor, she is much less likely to succeed if she is a mother. But fathers are actually much more likely to land a position and achieve tenure, even more likely than childless men.
Most academic mothers get stuck in what Mason calls the "second tier"—the low-pay, low-security, low-status, and zero-opportunity part-time and adjunct positions that now constitute a majority of college teaching. Female Ph.D.'s with children are more than twice as likely as men with children to work in this second tier. Therefore, although women are now equally represented in the academic pipeline, men will continue to dominate the senior ranks unless something changes.
Why exactly do the careers of academic fathers advance while academic mothers' stall? Does the difference stem from hiring committees' perceptions? Parental choices? Institutional discrimination? None of the above.
Academic fathers get a tailwind because they can be what the legal scholar Joan Williams calls "ideal workers." The ability of ideal workers to devote long hours and weekends to professional advancement, to attend conferences, to move for both short-term fellowships and jobs, and to drop everything to meet deadlines literally depends on the work of what Williams calls "marginalized caregivers," the supportive partners behind the scenes.
When male academics have children, their partners almost always pause their careers in order to be the main caregiver for periods ranging from three months to years.
Three months is long enough to write a book chapter and a conference paper. Maybe more.
For the duration of a full-time caregiver's occupation of the domestic sphere, not only are the children taken care of, but so most likely are meals, laundry, shopping, trip planning, and other domestic work to which the academic father likely used to contribute more when his partner worked as much as he did.
When a hiring committee expects to see a published book before it will even consider a job candidate for an assistant-professor position, only the childless and parents with full-time caregivers at home are eligible. When a tenure committee expects two books, academic mothers had better start looking for a new job unless they have been extremely lucky with fellowships and helpful grandparents. Even fathers who are committed to gender equity in the division of domestic work simply cannot compensate in the early years for mammary glands and uteri. Academic men shouldn't be penalized for lacking reproductive organs, but neither should academic women be penalized for having—and using—those organs.
Sex versus gender. Current academic policy in pursuit of gender equity rests on a faulty syllogism: Because women are equal to men, academic mothers should be treated the same as academic fathers.
But women during the years—years!—between planning for conception and weaning really are professionally inferior to men. Yes, I wrote inferior—simply unable to work as hard, as long, or as well as childless professors or academic fathers.
Here, the intellectual progress we've made by replacing the concept of sex with that of gender turns out to be an overcorrection. It is not social conditioning that creates this inferiority. It is not institutional discrimination either, although flexible parental-leave policies, tenure-clock stoppage, and child-care accommodations are indeed important. But this inferiority is a biological fact. It is about sex, not gender.
I'm talking about the vita gap. It's somewhat ironic that the name of the document by which academics represent their work has "life" at its root, because when academic women create life they starve their vitas. Time spent on reproduction is time away from scholarship, so mothers' competitors outproduce them on the most-important measure used by hiring committees in this buyers' market: quantity. Given two equally capable teachers with good recommendation letters, the fatter vita wins every time.
The faulty syllogism has led to a widely accepted practice of silence on child-related matters in hiring. For legal reasons, committees are not supposed to ask applicants any questions regarding marital or reproductive status; they are supposed to volunteer information regarding leave policies, local schools, and general family-friendliness to all applicants as a universal standard.
But the vita gap is only compounded by that policy of silence. I see three main problems with it.
Problem No. 1: Silence at the institutional level means that academic women enter their childbearing years blind. They do not know what obstacles they face, and Google is their only guide to surmounting them. Fortune may provide them with a good role model—an assistant professor who bears a child or two in plain view—but that role model has her own problems. As a new mother, she is taxed to capacity and, therefore, unable to be a consistent mentor, for which she gets no professional credit. If she is employed on the tenure track at a research institution, she is likely to get a full semester of paid leave. That is hardly the situation for most female academics of childbearing age.
For example, when I went ahead and had my second child during my third year of teaching in the "second tier" as an adjunct, I got ... a bouquet. That's all. Most new Ph.D.'s, male and female, now spend several years in the second tier, during which they have to work hard to fatten their vitas while teaching more courses than their tenure-track competitors simply in order to survive.
Many of the cash-strapped state universities and teaching-heavy colleges that provide the majority of tenure-track positions don't offer any paid parental leave at all. Academic women who give birth in such tenuous circumstances cannot follow in the footsteps of their wonderful role models. They have to keep teaching, even when their babies are tiny, or else their vitas will be not only skinny but stillborn. And as long as they are combining teaching with the intense care of early childhood, they are not producing scholarship.
Problem No. 2: Silence is hard to enforce. Who is going to blow the whistle on a hiring committee? Who is going to punish that committee for discrimination? How? On my road to the tenure track, I had four on-campus interviews. At three of them, members of the hiring department asked in a friendly way about my family status. I knew that violated protocol, but the code of silence meant that no one had trained me to deal with such questions. I answered honestly in the same friendly tone.
Did I get offered any of those three jobs? No. But I had no way to know whether that was due to discrimination of any sort, and I had no recourse for the ethical breach.
Problem No. 3: Silence makes the vita gap look merely like lesser competence. Academic mothers cannot tell hiring committees that they would have produced more scholarship, been more prepared for their interviews, and polished their job talks more if not for children. No matter how hard academic mothers work, at just the moment when their career potential is being evaluated, they appear less promising than fathers or people without children.
A recent president of the American Historical Association overcame the vita gap with a full-time nanny (who died in her kitchen), four hours of sleep a night, two days a week without lunch, and frequent bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia.
Silence as complicity. Not speaking of family status perpetuates the handicap of academic motherhood, which shouldn't hinder women's careers at all. So let's actually give academic mothers a handicap sticker to paste onto their vitas. Make the work of motherhood visible in women's academic records. By pinpointing only the strictly biological work that belongs to sex instead of gender, this handicap would function like replacing doorknobs with levers. It would make academic success accessible to mothers without creating a barrier for fathers or people without children.
Academic mothers should unblushingly total up the time spent on reproduction and credit it on their vitas. Give it its own category; call it "reproductive allowance." For my two "easy" pregnancies conceived exactly when I planned them with complication-free deliveries, quick recoveries, and no lactation problems, my conservative estimate is 1,810 hours spent. Each. That's a book, right there, and then some.
And that's exactly how it should appear on a vita: "Work that would otherwise be complete: a manuscript and an article." Hiring committees should see the real professional potential of academic mothers whose sex had prevented them from realizing that potential—yet.
For this handicap system to work, it is important to limit allotments to strictly sex-specific expenditures of time. Some tasks related to reproduction belong to the private decision-making of each family. Who does the research on child-care options, who takes the child to the pediatrician, and who mashes the baby food are not academe's responsibility. In other words, women who want to put in a "second shift" at home in perpetuity probably belong in the second tier.
But it is time for academe to acknowledge that women's productivity is slowed by reproduction. No one in the profession wants women to be hampered in their career advancement, so we should stop acting like having children is a problem. And silence is complicity. I daresay few if any male colleagues of mine have spent time Googling "male academic second child effect career." Acknowledging exactly how motherhood affects productivity in ways that fatherhood does not—acknowledging it openly, systematically, and professionwide—will cost nothing, hurt no one, and help thousands.
By the skin of my teeth, I made it onto the tenure track after four years on the job market, and thanks to my first teaching relief in seven years, it looks like I'll finish my first book, too. But for every successful academic mother, there are a good dozen hidden women who have either sacrificed their family plans for their careers or sacrificed their careers for their children. Choicelessly. To end that cycle of unequal academic motherhood, we have to make the personal not only political, but professional, too.
Amy Kittelstrom is an assistant professor of history at Sonoma State University and a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.
The Academic-Motherhood Handicap
By Amy Kittelstrom
One afternoon in the spring of 2005, after coming up dry in my second year of pursuing a tenure-track position, I typed the following words into Google: "female academic second child effect career." My firstborn was about to turn 2, I wanted him to have a sibling, and I needed guidance on this choice.
What Google made clear: Having children can devastate the career prospects of female academics, but the academic profession seems remarkably complacent about this handicap.
Although some research universities have instituted important family-friendly initiatives (which are economically out of reach for the majority of colleges and universities, especially now), even the most well-endowed universities practice hiring and promotion policies that actively—yet not deliberately—discriminate against academic mothers. Should the best-educated people on the planet simply accept unequal career prospects that clash with academics' own stated values of fairness?
Biology is real. Discrimination against academic mothers differs from other forms of discrimination in important ways. Children and "motherhood" have always been celebrated in American culture in ways that members of minority groups, for example, have decidedly not been. No department that I've ever heard of has any official or tacit policy against hiring or promoting mothers, who are often welcome to bring their children to departmental parties or meetings. In fact, academic mothers are treated no differently than academic fathers on this social level.
But that's the problem. Academic mothers are different than academic fathers. The differences are both sex-specific and time-limited, significant only during the intense years of childbearing and early caregiving—the years that matter most for academic careers.
Research by scholars such as Mary Ann Mason at the University of California at Berkeley paints a grim picture. If a woman wants to get hired as an assistant professor, she is much less likely to succeed if she is a mother. But fathers are actually much more likely to land a position and achieve tenure, even more likely than childless men.
Most academic mothers get stuck in what Mason calls the "second tier"—the low-pay, low-security, low-status, and zero-opportunity part-time and adjunct positions that now constitute a majority of college teaching. Female Ph.D.'s with children are more than twice as likely as men with children to work in this second tier. Therefore, although women are now equally represented in the academic pipeline, men will continue to dominate the senior ranks unless something changes.
Why exactly do the careers of academic fathers advance while academic mothers' stall? Does the difference stem from hiring committees' perceptions? Parental choices? Institutional discrimination? None of the above.
Academic fathers get a tailwind because they can be what the legal scholar Joan Williams calls "ideal workers." The ability of ideal workers to devote long hours and weekends to professional advancement, to attend conferences, to move for both short-term fellowships and jobs, and to drop everything to meet deadlines literally depends on the work of what Williams calls "marginalized caregivers," the supportive partners behind the scenes.
When male academics have children, their partners almost always pause their careers in order to be the main caregiver for periods ranging from three months to years.
Three months is long enough to write a book chapter and a conference paper. Maybe more.
For the duration of a full-time caregiver's occupation of the domestic sphere, not only are the children taken care of, but so most likely are meals, laundry, shopping, trip planning, and other domestic work to which the academic father likely used to contribute more when his partner worked as much as he did.
When a hiring committee expects to see a published book before it will even consider a job candidate for an assistant-professor position, only the childless and parents with full-time caregivers at home are eligible. When a tenure committee expects two books, academic mothers had better start looking for a new job unless they have been extremely lucky with fellowships and helpful grandparents. Even fathers who are committed to gender equity in the division of domestic work simply cannot compensate in the early years for mammary glands and uteri. Academic men shouldn't be penalized for lacking reproductive organs, but neither should academic women be penalized for having—and using—those organs.
Sex versus gender. Current academic policy in pursuit of gender equity rests on a faulty syllogism: Because women are equal to men, academic mothers should be treated the same as academic fathers.
But women during the years—years!—between planning for conception and weaning really are professionally inferior to men. Yes, I wrote inferior—simply unable to work as hard, as long, or as well as childless professors or academic fathers.
Here, the intellectual progress we've made by replacing the concept of sex with that of gender turns out to be an overcorrection. It is not social conditioning that creates this inferiority. It is not institutional discrimination either, although flexible parental-leave policies, tenure-clock stoppage, and child-care accommodations are indeed important. But this inferiority is a biological fact. It is about sex, not gender.
I'm talking about the vita gap. It's somewhat ironic that the name of the document by which academics represent their work has "life" at its root, because when academic women create life they starve their vitas. Time spent on reproduction is time away from scholarship, so mothers' competitors outproduce them on the most-important measure used by hiring committees in this buyers' market: quantity. Given two equally capable teachers with good recommendation letters, the fatter vita wins every time.
The faulty syllogism has led to a widely accepted practice of silence on child-related matters in hiring. For legal reasons, committees are not supposed to ask applicants any questions regarding marital or reproductive status; they are supposed to volunteer information regarding leave policies, local schools, and general family-friendliness to all applicants as a universal standard.
But the vita gap is only compounded by that policy of silence. I see three main problems with it.
Problem No. 1: Silence at the institutional level means that academic women enter their childbearing years blind. They do not know what obstacles they face, and Google is their only guide to surmounting them. Fortune may provide them with a good role model—an assistant professor who bears a child or two in plain view—but that role model has her own problems. As a new mother, she is taxed to capacity and, therefore, unable to be a consistent mentor, for which she gets no professional credit. If she is employed on the tenure track at a research institution, she is likely to get a full semester of paid leave. That is hardly the situation for most female academics of childbearing age.
For example, when I went ahead and had my second child during my third year of teaching in the "second tier" as an adjunct, I got ... a bouquet. That's all. Most new Ph.D.'s, male and female, now spend several years in the second tier, during which they have to work hard to fatten their vitas while teaching more courses than their tenure-track competitors simply in order to survive.
Many of the cash-strapped state universities and teaching-heavy colleges that provide the majority of tenure-track positions don't offer any paid parental leave at all. Academic women who give birth in such tenuous circumstances cannot follow in the footsteps of their wonderful role models. They have to keep teaching, even when their babies are tiny, or else their vitas will be not only skinny but stillborn. And as long as they are combining teaching with the intense care of early childhood, they are not producing scholarship.
Problem No. 2: Silence is hard to enforce. Who is going to blow the whistle on a hiring committee? Who is going to punish that committee for discrimination? How? On my road to the tenure track, I had four on-campus interviews. At three of them, members of the hiring department asked in a friendly way about my family status. I knew that violated protocol, but the code of silence meant that no one had trained me to deal with such questions. I answered honestly in the same friendly tone.
Did I get offered any of those three jobs? No. But I had no way to know whether that was due to discrimination of any sort, and I had no recourse for the ethical breach.
Problem No. 3: Silence makes the vita gap look merely like lesser competence. Academic mothers cannot tell hiring committees that they would have produced more scholarship, been more prepared for their interviews, and polished their job talks more if not for children. No matter how hard academic mothers work, at just the moment when their career potential is being evaluated, they appear less promising than fathers or people without children.
A recent president of the American Historical Association overcame the vita gap with a full-time nanny (who died in her kitchen), four hours of sleep a night, two days a week without lunch, and frequent bouts of bronchitis and pneumonia.
Silence as complicity. Not speaking of family status perpetuates the handicap of academic motherhood, which shouldn't hinder women's careers at all. So let's actually give academic mothers a handicap sticker to paste onto their vitas. Make the work of motherhood visible in women's academic records. By pinpointing only the strictly biological work that belongs to sex instead of gender, this handicap would function like replacing doorknobs with levers. It would make academic success accessible to mothers without creating a barrier for fathers or people without children.
Academic mothers should unblushingly total up the time spent on reproduction and credit it on their vitas. Give it its own category; call it "reproductive allowance." For my two "easy" pregnancies conceived exactly when I planned them with complication-free deliveries, quick recoveries, and no lactation problems, my conservative estimate is 1,810 hours spent. Each. That's a book, right there, and then some.
And that's exactly how it should appear on a vita: "Work that would otherwise be complete: a manuscript and an article." Hiring committees should see the real professional potential of academic mothers whose sex had prevented them from realizing that potential—yet.
For this handicap system to work, it is important to limit allotments to strictly sex-specific expenditures of time. Some tasks related to reproduction belong to the private decision-making of each family. Who does the research on child-care options, who takes the child to the pediatrician, and who mashes the baby food are not academe's responsibility. In other words, women who want to put in a "second shift" at home in perpetuity probably belong in the second tier.
But it is time for academe to acknowledge that women's productivity is slowed by reproduction. No one in the profession wants women to be hampered in their career advancement, so we should stop acting like having children is a problem. And silence is complicity. I daresay few if any male colleagues of mine have spent time Googling "male academic second child effect career." Acknowledging exactly how motherhood affects productivity in ways that fatherhood does not—acknowledging it openly, systematically, and professionwide—will cost nothing, hurt no one, and help thousands.
By the skin of my teeth, I made it onto the tenure track after four years on the job market, and thanks to my first teaching relief in seven years, it looks like I'll finish my first book, too. But for every successful academic mother, there are a good dozen hidden women who have either sacrificed their family plans for their careers or sacrificed their careers for their children. Choicelessly. To end that cycle of unequal academic motherhood, we have to make the personal not only political, but professional, too.
Amy Kittelstrom is an assistant professor of history at Sonoma State University and a visiting fellow at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University.
Women, Birth, Death, and Mathematics
February 7, 2010
Chronicle of Higher Education
Women, Birth, Death, and Mathematics
By Susan D'Agostino
When I decided to become a mathematician, I assumed that my greatest challenge would be intellectual. That was before the Christmas Eve my father made shrimp scampi in a Pyrex dish under the broiler. When he opened the oven and added cold lemon juice to the sizzling prawns, shards of glass flew 15 feet in every direction. Normally a fastidious cook, he had been distracted by my mother, who, at that moment, was telling my very young children—because none of the adults would listen—what she wanted for Christmas: for the family to acknowledge that it was time for her to die.
Nothing in my graduate program had trained me for this. I am a doctor, but not that kind of doctor. Not that being an oncologist would have helped at that point. With Stage 4 kidney cancer, my mother had no more than months to live. I was not at all surprised when my father picked up the shrimp and ate it; it was an earnest, if dangerous, attempt to show the power of mind over matter.
The message was that none of this was happening: The shrimp was not infused with glass, and my mother was not dying. At the time, I might have added that, in spite of my decision to take time away from formal employment to care for my babies and mother, my intelligence and training still had currency in the world of academe.
The day of the exploding shrimp seems like ages ago. My children are now in grade school, my mother has passed away, and I am an assistant math professor at an institution that makes me extremely happy. Still, I can remember the confusion that resulted from following my heart rather than toeing the feminist line.
Discussing this topic does not come easy. Having earned my doctorate right on schedule—with a baby on my hip, no less—and landing an assistant professorship in the geographic region of my choice, I could easily portray myself as some sort of mathematical, feminist superhero. In particular, I could gloss over the fact that there was a period in which I took time away from academe to change a lot of diapers and serve as a nurse to my terminally ill mother.
But just as I tell my daughter that she has more options than "witch" or "princess" for Halloween, I want to exist somewhere between "nun for science" and "stay-at-home mom." I have tremendous gratitude for the feminists who blazed the path before me. However, I respectfully reject the notion that my desire to engage in these so-called female activities is a 1950s-era can of worms that is better left unopened.
I am compelled to write because when I was thinking about family planning and end-of-life issues, it was the rare woman in math who revealed any ambivalence about how personal choices affected her professional life. Were there women who, in the absence of maternity leave or affordable child care, dropped out of their math graduate programs upon the births of their children? Or women who delayed childbearing only to struggle later with age-related infertility? Or women who were racked with guilt when a parent died alone in a hospital bed because they could not afford the time away from research?
As a math graduate student, I attended many women-in-math conferences, but those were not the stories I heard. There was casual mention of finding a "work-life balance," but most of the discussion concerned achieving equity. And when it came to equity, the messages converged around a central theme: "Work more," "Hire a nanny," or, my favorite, "That's what hospice volunteers are for."
Something changed for me during my hiatus from academe. No, I did not, as some had either feared or predicted, lose my ambition. Yet I am no longer the woman who, as a graduate student, took pride in the fact that I returned to work just days after having given birth. Of course, with no formal maternity leave, I felt that I had little choice. Still, my former self happily spun my postpartum math research as proof that I was making it in the old boys' network. My present self, on the other hand, is no longer concerned with the old boys' network. Rather, my present self strives to live the life that I want, which includes both family and work.
During my time away from academe, I realized that the world is much bigger than those in academe would lead you to believe. I came to realize that if academe did not see my merits, then I could still find work that was both stimulating and satisfying outside of it. As my mother's early death poignantly illustrates, life is fleeting. Too fleeting, in fact, to have only one definition of success.
This change of heart has made all of the difference in my life. Like businesswomen who ultimately rejected oversized shoulder pads as a superficial, not to mention odd, attempt to mimic their male counterparts, I am no longer trying to be the archetypal male mathematician who has a wife to birth his babies and a sister to care for his dying mother.
Today I am a mathematician who willingly participates in the nurturing surrounding birth and death. The fact that I can state that proudly is not just good for me but is also good for math. Just as biodiversity is vital to an ecosystem, diversity of experience and perspective is crucial in academic research. Research involves asking questions, and the kinds of questions an individual is predisposed to ask are constrained by his or her gender, language, and cultural background.
The Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock described the uniquely feminine and, at the time, revolutionary approach that motivated her research in Evelyn Fox Keller's biography of her, A Feeling for the Organism. McClintock treated individual corn plants as if they were distinct children she had reared from birth. She used words like "patience" and "listening" as she gained an "intimate" knowledge of what distinguished one corn plant from another. In doing so, she cultivated what she referred to as a "feeling for the organism" that most people develop only with humans or pets.
And Dian Fossey's groundbreaking research methods were decidedly feminine, writes Sy Montgomery in Walking With the Great Apes, because of her intense focus on nurturing relationships with individual gorillas. Fossey broke the previously undisputed rule of maintaining a distance from her subjects, much to the benefit of science.
Who is to say that any marginalization I experienced as a woman or mother in math did not influence my decision to study nonlinear codes as opposed to the more mainstream linear codes? Only later did I learn of a connection between nonlinear codes and the hot topic of quantum error-correcting codes.
When the math community recognizes that some women not only pace their careers differently from the archetypal man but may want to allow room for some (dare I say it?) stereotypically female endeavors, the groundwork will be laid for equity. In the meantime, if you are a young woman establishing yourself as a mathematician while at the same time contemplating family planning or elder care, take heart. Being a woman attempting to combine birth, death, and mathematics is a great challenge—greater, I think, than doing math in a vacuum. However, there is nothing I would change about the path I have followed. And if I ever run into you at a conference, I will very likely tell you as much.
Susan D'Agostino is an assistant professor of mathematics at Southern New Hampshire University.
Chronicle of Higher Education
Women, Birth, Death, and Mathematics
By Susan D'Agostino
When I decided to become a mathematician, I assumed that my greatest challenge would be intellectual. That was before the Christmas Eve my father made shrimp scampi in a Pyrex dish under the broiler. When he opened the oven and added cold lemon juice to the sizzling prawns, shards of glass flew 15 feet in every direction. Normally a fastidious cook, he had been distracted by my mother, who, at that moment, was telling my very young children—because none of the adults would listen—what she wanted for Christmas: for the family to acknowledge that it was time for her to die.
Nothing in my graduate program had trained me for this. I am a doctor, but not that kind of doctor. Not that being an oncologist would have helped at that point. With Stage 4 kidney cancer, my mother had no more than months to live. I was not at all surprised when my father picked up the shrimp and ate it; it was an earnest, if dangerous, attempt to show the power of mind over matter.
The message was that none of this was happening: The shrimp was not infused with glass, and my mother was not dying. At the time, I might have added that, in spite of my decision to take time away from formal employment to care for my babies and mother, my intelligence and training still had currency in the world of academe.
The day of the exploding shrimp seems like ages ago. My children are now in grade school, my mother has passed away, and I am an assistant math professor at an institution that makes me extremely happy. Still, I can remember the confusion that resulted from following my heart rather than toeing the feminist line.
Discussing this topic does not come easy. Having earned my doctorate right on schedule—with a baby on my hip, no less—and landing an assistant professorship in the geographic region of my choice, I could easily portray myself as some sort of mathematical, feminist superhero. In particular, I could gloss over the fact that there was a period in which I took time away from academe to change a lot of diapers and serve as a nurse to my terminally ill mother.
But just as I tell my daughter that she has more options than "witch" or "princess" for Halloween, I want to exist somewhere between "nun for science" and "stay-at-home mom." I have tremendous gratitude for the feminists who blazed the path before me. However, I respectfully reject the notion that my desire to engage in these so-called female activities is a 1950s-era can of worms that is better left unopened.
I am compelled to write because when I was thinking about family planning and end-of-life issues, it was the rare woman in math who revealed any ambivalence about how personal choices affected her professional life. Were there women who, in the absence of maternity leave or affordable child care, dropped out of their math graduate programs upon the births of their children? Or women who delayed childbearing only to struggle later with age-related infertility? Or women who were racked with guilt when a parent died alone in a hospital bed because they could not afford the time away from research?
As a math graduate student, I attended many women-in-math conferences, but those were not the stories I heard. There was casual mention of finding a "work-life balance," but most of the discussion concerned achieving equity. And when it came to equity, the messages converged around a central theme: "Work more," "Hire a nanny," or, my favorite, "That's what hospice volunteers are for."
Something changed for me during my hiatus from academe. No, I did not, as some had either feared or predicted, lose my ambition. Yet I am no longer the woman who, as a graduate student, took pride in the fact that I returned to work just days after having given birth. Of course, with no formal maternity leave, I felt that I had little choice. Still, my former self happily spun my postpartum math research as proof that I was making it in the old boys' network. My present self, on the other hand, is no longer concerned with the old boys' network. Rather, my present self strives to live the life that I want, which includes both family and work.
During my time away from academe, I realized that the world is much bigger than those in academe would lead you to believe. I came to realize that if academe did not see my merits, then I could still find work that was both stimulating and satisfying outside of it. As my mother's early death poignantly illustrates, life is fleeting. Too fleeting, in fact, to have only one definition of success.
This change of heart has made all of the difference in my life. Like businesswomen who ultimately rejected oversized shoulder pads as a superficial, not to mention odd, attempt to mimic their male counterparts, I am no longer trying to be the archetypal male mathematician who has a wife to birth his babies and a sister to care for his dying mother.
Today I am a mathematician who willingly participates in the nurturing surrounding birth and death. The fact that I can state that proudly is not just good for me but is also good for math. Just as biodiversity is vital to an ecosystem, diversity of experience and perspective is crucial in academic research. Research involves asking questions, and the kinds of questions an individual is predisposed to ask are constrained by his or her gender, language, and cultural background.
The Nobel Prize-winning geneticist Barbara McClintock described the uniquely feminine and, at the time, revolutionary approach that motivated her research in Evelyn Fox Keller's biography of her, A Feeling for the Organism. McClintock treated individual corn plants as if they were distinct children she had reared from birth. She used words like "patience" and "listening" as she gained an "intimate" knowledge of what distinguished one corn plant from another. In doing so, she cultivated what she referred to as a "feeling for the organism" that most people develop only with humans or pets.
And Dian Fossey's groundbreaking research methods were decidedly feminine, writes Sy Montgomery in Walking With the Great Apes, because of her intense focus on nurturing relationships with individual gorillas. Fossey broke the previously undisputed rule of maintaining a distance from her subjects, much to the benefit of science.
Who is to say that any marginalization I experienced as a woman or mother in math did not influence my decision to study nonlinear codes as opposed to the more mainstream linear codes? Only later did I learn of a connection between nonlinear codes and the hot topic of quantum error-correcting codes.
When the math community recognizes that some women not only pace their careers differently from the archetypal man but may want to allow room for some (dare I say it?) stereotypically female endeavors, the groundwork will be laid for equity. In the meantime, if you are a young woman establishing yourself as a mathematician while at the same time contemplating family planning or elder care, take heart. Being a woman attempting to combine birth, death, and mathematics is a great challenge—greater, I think, than doing math in a vacuum. However, there is nothing I would change about the path I have followed. And if I ever run into you at a conference, I will very likely tell you as much.
Susan D'Agostino is an assistant professor of mathematics at Southern New Hampshire University.
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