I have changed my mind about “women in STEM”

Disclaimers: Views my own, and limited to my cis-gendered perspective.

“Another year, another Internation Women’s Day”, wrote Athene Donald earlier this month. With this resignation that we still need this day (or week, or month), I opened my inbox awaiting the yearly email from the Maths Faculty in which maths students are reminded that women are also allowed to become academic mathematicians, even at Cambridge. The email never came this year (at least to PhD students like myself) and it seems as if their “Women in Mathematics” page hasn’t been updated since last year’s IWD (the slideshow isn’t new). That was probably not due to forgetfulness, but due to a lack of anything new to say, to be honest, things haven’t really changed. I, however, have changed my mind, at least from the last time I wrote about “being a woman in maths”.

Throughout this post, I will refer to what I’ve experienced: being a maths student (first undergraduate, and now postgraduate) at Cambridge. This is of course a rather small and biased sample of what happens globally and at later career stages, but I think it’s a good starting point to start fixing things, for two reasons:

• Firstly, we know by example that it could get better: Oxford has about twice the proportion of female maths undergrads than Cambridge does (~30% rather than ~15%) -I don’t know what is the gender attaintment gap in Oxford-. Obviously Oxford and Cambridge are not the same, but both take students from almost the same pools. If we can identify the factors that are making things as they are relative to Oxford and find solutions, then we have a starting point for a more global approach by amplifying these solutions.
• Secondly, that the undergraduate level is relatively very early on in academia’s leaky pipeline. So there is no many other prior stages we can’t blame for not giving enough women interested in maths. Of course, there is pre-university education, and I am aware that in the UK the proportion of female students taking A-Levels in Further Maths or Physics is already very low. In other countries, like Spain where I am from or China, everyone is forced to learn mathematics throughout all school years. While this has some negative consequences (like slowing down the students who actually want to learn maths), my impression is that (in Spain at least), a larger proportion of women choose to pursue an STEM undergraduate degree, so maybe that is something that countries like the UK should reconsider…

Ok, so from now on I will be referring to (being a woman in Maths at) Cambridge, unless I say otherwise. With the pleasant surprise that my own research area as a PhD student, mathematical biology / epidemiology, seems to a nice exception, my experience follows a parallelism with Eugenia Cheng’s journey, as described in her book “x+y: A Mathematician’s Manifesto for Rethinking Gender”. The book is certainly not perfect, and her proposed framework is far from solving these problems, but I would make every single Cambridge (male) mathematician, be it student or academic, read this book, as it describes so well what many (non-male) mathematicians experience. Since the Maths Faculty won’t be handing out free copies of “x+y” anytime soon (and I’d very much would like to be proved wrong!), I will quote Cheng throughout my post, as in the format below:

When I finally did start thinking about being a woman, the aspect that struck me was: why had I not felt any need to think about it before?

This is almost true for myself. For the first three years of my degree, I didn’t really overthink the role my gender played in my academic development. Yes, I was obviously aware of the low proportion of female faces in my lectures, and as my degree progressed, I learned that women are half as likely to get a First. Luckily for me, by the time I learnt that fact in third year, I had already beaten odds. I had overcome imposter’s syndrome (which most people experience to some extent, but women do so more acutely) and had managed to become the only woman in a friendship group of other maths students. I even claimed me that I wasn’t affected by whatever force was making my female classmates less successful, because of course, a love of competition was the only thing that made men more likely to succeed, and I was as competitive as men. With the exception of some explicitly sexist behaviour, which sadly does still exist in the Faculty and elsewhere, I could not think of any other reason to explain these gaps. And because I had (in hindsight, emulated, even in the way I dressed) the competitiveness of men, I was safe. All the other women had to do was to try harder at fitting around maths lectures.

In fact, after several years of university life mostly surrounded by male professors, I moved to a women’s college as a junior research fellow and met a large number of women professors for the first time. I found that the environment was, disappointingly, not very different, because so many of the women fulfilled the dominant and domineering roles that men might otherwise have occupied. The women were very successfully emulating stereotypically male behaviour, and eventually I found I was doing it too: I was learning to be competitive, ambitious, assertive, unyielding.

Cheng defines this behaviour as ingressive: “focusing on oneself over society and community, imposing on people more than taking others into account, emphasising independence and individualism, more competitive and adversarial than collaborative, tendency towards selective or single-track thought processes”. The alternative is congressive behaviour: “Focusing on society and community over self, taking others into account more than imposing on them, emphasising interdependence and interconnectedness, more collaborative and cooperative than competitive, circumspect thought processes”.

The way the maths tripos is evidently ingressive, for example, by favouring risk-taking behaviour in the exams, and four exams in June being all of your mark.

And understanding that things like exam results and prizes can be a bit unpredictable (and contentious) is, I think, part of having a balanced response to them

The course does not need to be assessed the way it is: it is not even optimal for mathematics research, let alone for any other job a maths graduate might pursue outside of academia. There is no reason why the course should remain the same it’s been for literally hundreds of years, even before women were allowed to take part. In addition to exams, we could asses students through oral presentations, like giving a short talk in a maths topic of their choice, or through a written dissertation / long essays. We could also allow students to change a paper by doing some teaching at schools (I believe the physics department has something similar for their students) or even to offer an examinable course on “mathematics education” (which many other universities do have). I would also make examinable versions of the courses on ethics in maths, philosophy of mathematics, and history of mathematics; and I’d teach more mathematical biology than what we have currently. And I would require every student to write an essay, not necessarily very long, on “diversity in mathematics”. I would introduce collaborative group projects, which could be anything from writing together a large piece of code to play a mathematical game from popular maths outreach / communication. I would also change the structure of exams so that each exam corresponds to one and only one course (so that it is not possible to study the easy parts of many courses, rather than learning full courses in detail, just to do well in exams.), and I might consider spreading exams throughout the year (as in many other departments, including physics), so that doing exams doesn’t feel so much like a huge competition you’ve been preparing for a whole year.

I am lucky that I was not put in for any maths competitions when I was a teenager as I would have hated it and possibly concluded that I was not cut out to be a mathematician.

Like Eugenia, I did not do any maths competitions at all when I was a teenager. For many years, I was angry at my high school because they were not into that kind of things. I am not sure if I would have enjoyed it or not, but it certainly would have made my first year of undergrad (and the year before applying) much easier than what it was.

But I would rather pose the question: is it important for us to persuade more girls to take part? The Olympiad is not the be-all-and-end-all of mathematical achievement. It is a constructed competition in a field that really doesn’t have competition as its focal point. The Olympiad teams do often involve people who go on to become brilliant or great mathematical researchers, but there are plenty of other ways to become brilliant mathematicians as well. In fact, maths competitions run the risk of actually putting off some people who like maths but don’t like competitions: such as me.

As Eugenia says, so much focus in competition (clearly ingressive) does not come without cost, and I hope we find other, congressive, ways to let everyone become great mathematicians, be it at high school or university.

Surprisingly, one other reason why I think men do better than women at Cambridge maths comes from congressive behaviour in men. Discussing maths problems with other students can be extremely helpful. While collaborative study is more emphasized at the graduate level (in PhD because it’s research, and in Part III with “study groups”), at the undergraduate level there is never an explicit mention of this. Of course, you can only do this with someone studying maths. And if you’re a woman, chances are that the friends you’re closer with are not mathematicians and that you’d feel unconfident asking men to discuss things with you. By the way, most of them will say yes if you do, but what I mean goes a step further: some men don’t need to go asking around for someone to discuss maths with them, it just happens every evening at dinner with their male college friends.

While waiting for the faculty to do something to incentivise cross-college maths interactions (its lack also favour students at colleges with a larger maths cohort, irrespective of gender), I realised that it is also important for me to have a female maths friends, not to talk about maths, but just because it is a community of people who experience similar things. For the past year, I’ve been in the committee of the Emmy Noether Society (for female and non-binary mathematicians at Cambridge), trying to make each non-male maths student welcomed. However, some female mathematicians I have spoken with felt, like I used to feel and I still do to some extent, that there is no reason why they should come to women-only events.

It is also important that this should not be about some sort of arbitrary ‘sisterhood’. Women’s groups can be off-putting to some women and also seem exclusionary of men. They also too often neglect intersectionality and just end up creating a new hierarchy of power inside them, with straight, middle-class, able-bodied, cisgendered white women at the top imposing their power on all the other women. Instead we could make congressive groups for congressive people and people interested in congressivity.

However, the “congressive ENS” shouldn’t be the solution to everything. Firstly, the Faculty shouldn’t pass it all into us, who have other to “solve” its problem. Secondly, things like the ENS seem to be an excuse to delay actually solving the fundamental, structural problems that we have.

Finally, the ENS, as well as similar groups, events or mentorships schemes are all organised by other women. While this makes sense in some circumstances, it also makes it seem as if the gender ratio problem was something that women need to fix for other women. This is not only wrong, but also puts an extra load into the women doing these things, potentially at a detriment of their own careers. I tend to say yes when I am asked to speak at a “women in maths event” or to be a mentor for someone else, but it’s important that men can also take part (eg giving a lecture or career advice): some of the people who helped me academically the most to get where I am today have been men. Some women will disagree with me, but I wish more men were actively involved in “women in maths” things: not only would this give us other perspectives, it’d also save us time. I am of course writing this post, in the off-chance that someone changes something after reading it, for a non-negligible amount of time, but I’d love to see a response article to this post written by one of my male colleagues. A friend of mine, when applying to postdocs, during the “do you have any questions for us” part of the interviews, asked her interviewers “what do you do to help women in science?”. The responses she got were ranged from “to be honest, I myself don’t do anything and I don’t know about the university” to “well, I think there’s a thing you can apply to if you get pregnant….”, but all equally disappointing. Of course, it’s easy for me to say this and I am aware that I’d struggle to answer what I do to help other minorities in science.

In Becoming, Michelle Obama writes of working to remedy the imbalance in her law firm which hired people who were predominantly male and white. She had to persuade the recruiting team to look beyond the usual metrics of prestigious universities and exam results, and consider their background to understand whether they’d coasted on privilege or raised themselves up from difficult beginnings. I would now call that thinking congressively rather than ingressively about hiring.

To clarify, I don’t think ingressivity is bad itself, but maths does not need this huge bias towards ingressivity. I consider myself to have certain ingressive character traits, but whether I’ve always been ingressive or it’s been a survival mechanism, I find it hard to say…

But, again, it’s not just men: sometimes it’s women who are too ingressive, especially in fields like academia where they may have felt the need to emulate such behaviour to succeed, and having done so might be rather proud of it and suspicious of any suggestion that another way is possible.

But there’s also a congressive side of me, which I think has also helped me. I’ve always been interested in a lot of things and in high school I was pretty much a generalist (instead of doing maths olympiads, I kept busy learning biology!). My own interdisciplinary research field (which is more gender-balanced than the rest of maths) is another example of congressivity, and one of the main reasons why I went into it was because I wanted my research to help other people!

I am probably somewhere in the middle between congressivity and ingressivity, and every person won’t be fully one or the other, but women, on average will have a tendency to congressivity whereas men towards ingressivity. The current system is biased towards ingressivity, and incidentally, congressive men, who are also disadvantaged by it, will be the ones more aware of this, since ingressive men won’t care about the problems of congressive people, by the nature of their ingressivity.

Of course; there’s more to than ingressivity and congressivity in the gender ratio problem. Even as a mostly ingressive person myself, at times in the past I felt isolated and lacked friends, especially female, as a result of the proportions we have. But I do think this is a good starting point for approaching the problems in a systemic way.