Strength in Numbers

By ROBIN WILSON (Claremont, CA)

(Published in the "Chronicle of Higher Education", July 18, 2003)

About a dozen young women cluster around tables in Room 211 of Pomona College's Millikan 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 and
just 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.