Women in math at BYU

[alas]

My husband just showed me a thing about a seminar at BYU. It is called "Women in Math" and all the presenters are men. Anyone see a problem with this?

[Kishkumen]

It made the rounds yesterday on reddit exmo. Everyone got a good laugh as well as expressing much frustration.

Search 'BYU Math' on facebook and go to their facebook page, the comments are beyond entertaining.

I have a little side story about this topic regarding my parents. Maybe I'll do a write-up about it soon. Long story short, both parents recognize sexism in the BYU Math Dept, neither recognize it in church leadership structure.

[Jeffret]

Here's one story: BYU's women-in-math session poster features, oh, all men

Even if you happen to believe that math is a male preserve, it's a painful piece of marketing.

Or are these math boffins supposed to be, oh, the sexiest members of the department?

I contacted the BYU math department to ask whether this was a slight faux-pas on its part. I will update, should I hear.

On the math department's Facebook page, however, they all think this is funny.

"The poster featured the pictures of four of our department faculty. It was done with good intentions but with poor judgment and was not meant to be satire, though we did all get a good laugh here at the department," said the department.

They all got a good laugh? Even the female members of the department? There are some. Well, when I say "some"..

A glance at the list of the permanent faculty members shows just one woman: Denise Halverson.

Or this one: BYU math club responds to criticism of ‘Women in Math’ poster featuring all men

"I was just kind of shocked at first," said BYU junior Stephanie Driggs, of seeing the promotional poster.

It contains pictures of four male speakers. Below their pictures, the poster reads, "WOMEN IN MATH," and below that, "FOR ALL WOMEN WHO LOVE MATH."

"I thought it was just a joke that someone was playing," Driggs said. "It was just, 'Women in Math' and then four white guys: It was almost comical to see."

She tweeted out a photo with the caption "...is this satire?" which quickly gained tens of thousands of likes, thousands of retweets and hundreds of replies.
...
Women in Math club advisor Martha Kilpack said the club saw the post online, and received messages and emails.

They took the posters down, she said, because of the offense people took.

But that's not at all what the club meant by the poster, she expressed.

"It was an honest mistake kind of poster," Kilpack said. "It wasn't meant to be a political statement. It wasn't meant to be anything other than encourage female students to come to an activity."

She said it was unfortunate that the poster was taken in a different light.

But it wasn't taken in a different light. It was taken in exactly the same light in which it was presented.

[2bizE]

This is just all a symptom of the churches hierarchy structure: all male and exclude women as much as possible

[shadow]

My favorite thing about this story is that I came across it completely outside of the DAMU. So, I guess it's not just BYU sports that make a good missionary.

[RubinHighlander]

My DW sent me a snap of that poster yesterday. Picture is worth more than a thousand words in this case me thinks.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/co ... 3053a75035

[Hagoth]

What's funny is that the obvious problem here probably didn't even occur to any men on the project and the women probably didn't dare bring it up for fear of offending the priesthood.

[StarbucksMom]

My DW sent me a snap of that poster yesterday. Picture is worth more than a thousand words in this case me thinks.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/co ... 3053a75035

This is pretty sad and hilarious at the same time. LDS Inc is really on a roll! Wonder what they'll do to make national news next week?

[2bizE]

the guy on the left looks a liittle like Tom Hanks.

[slavereeno]

my post was off topic, bowing out.

cheers.

[MoPag]

But frankly, I just don't see females being treated poorly or being ignored on an institutional level (there are always ass-hats out there but they treat everyone badly and not targeting females in STEM specifically).

And men in the church will claim that they don't see women treated poorly in the church either. But we are. The problems facing women in STEM are more subtle that you might think.

Check out this article from Harvard Business Review:

https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-5-biases-pu ... ut-of-stem

From the article:

Pattern 1: Prove-it-Again. Two-thirds of the women interviewed, and two-thirds of the women surveyed, reported having to prove themselves over and over again – their successes discounted, their expertise questioned. “People just assume you’re not going to be able to cut it,” a statistician told us, in a typical comment. Black women were considerably more likely than other women to report having to deal with this type of bias; three-fourths of black women did. (And few Asian-American women felt that the stereotype of Asian-Americans as good at science helped them; that stereotype may well chiefly benefit Asian-American men.)

Experimental social psychologists have documented this type of bias over and over again in college labs, but this is the first time someone has taken that experimental literature and asked women whether it describes their experience in actual workplaces. It does.

or

Pattern 2: The Tightrope. Women need to behave in masculine ways in order to be seen as competent—but women are expected to be feminine. So women find themselves walking a tightrope between being seen as too feminine to be competent, and too masculine to be likable. More than a third (34.1%) of scientists surveyed reported feeling pressure to play a traditionally feminine role, with Asian Americans (40.9%) more likely than other groups of women to report this. About half of the scientists we surveyed (53.0%) reported backlash for displaying stereotypically “masculine” behaviors like speaking their minds directly or being decisive.

These probably aren't things that you as a man would notice. But I promise you women in STEM deal with them every day.

[alas]

But frankly, I just don't see females being treated poorly or being ignored on an institutional level (there are always ass-hats out there but they treat everyone badly and not targeting females in STEM specifically).

And men in the church will claim that they don't see women treated poorly in the church either. But we are. The problems facing women in STEM are more subtle that you might think.

Check out this article from Harvard Business Review:

https://hbr.org/2015/03/the-5-biases-pu ... ut-of-stem

From the article:

Pattern 1: Prove-it-Again. Two-thirds of the women interviewed, and two-thirds of the women surveyed, reported having to prove themselves over and over again – their successes discounted, their expertise questioned. “People just assume you’re not going to be able to cut it,” a statistician told us, in a typical comment. Black women were considerably more likely than other women to report having to deal with this type of bias; three-fourths of black women did. (And few Asian-American women felt that the stereotype of Asian-Americans as good at science helped them; that stereotype may well chiefly benefit Asian-American men.)

Experimental social psychologists have documented this type of bias over and over again in college labs, but this is the first time someone has taken that experimental literature and asked women whether it describes their experience in actual workplaces. It does.

or

Pattern 2: The Tightrope. Women need to behave in masculine ways in order to be seen as competent—but women are expected to be feminine. So women find themselves walking a tightrope between being seen as too feminine to be competent, and too masculine to be likable. More than a third (34.1%) of scientists surveyed reported feeling pressure to play a traditionally feminine role, with Asian Americans (40.9%) more likely than other groups of women to report this. About half of the scientists we surveyed (53.0%) reported backlash for displaying stereotypically “masculine” behaviors like speaking their minds directly or being decisive.

These probably aren't things that you as a man would notice. But I promise you women in STEM deal with them every day.

This.

I just find it frustrating that especially Mormon men think they know women's experience, and know how to advise them to live their life. A man will not even see the problem, let alone be able to give tips on how to cope. It s like white people who think there is no more racism because they don't see it.

Yes, things are better than they were 40 years ago when high school teachers graded my tests harsher than the boys for the same error. Boy misses the appropriate placement of decimal point and it is minus one point on a problem worth 20 points. Girl misses the proper placement of decimal point and it is minus 10 points.

Now the outright open sexism is more hidden and subtle.

But the open sexism was not what discouraged me from pursuing a career in math. That made me angry and determined to show the male SOBs up. It was the subtle stuff that you couldn't quite name. I coped with having to prove myself. But the not constantly being treated like I just didn't belong. Is the teacher treating me this way because I am a girl, or is he just a jerk, or am I not really as good at this stuff as my test scores indicate? It is the not knowing if it is sexism or me that is most difficult to deal with.

I imagine the people who set up this conference didn't mean to slap women in the face with this conference, but it does. It is the same as straight people telling gays how to live. The same as whites telling black's how to deal with racism. It is the same as men telling women to stay home and make babies and support your husband's career as the only way to have a happy life. That is what makes men happy, but the men really do not know what makes women happy. This conference would have done better to pull their women math students in to form a panel and discuss the issue rather than have men lecture women on how to deal with sexism.

The whole problem is that the men do not know how clueless they are.

Same topic of men not really comprehending women's experience. On one of the feminist blogs, I was reading old archived posts and this man was telling women the "tricks" he was taught in business school about how to be heard in a meeting and thinking the women could use these methods to be heard in ward councils. I read through them and thought how they may work for men because men have a basic level of respect (priesthood) that women do not have and men can make friends with others in the meeting to get them on their side because the others are most likely men, so the problem with applying the make friends with others outside of meetings to get them on your side in the meeting is that women are forbidden to make friends with men, who are 90% of the people at the meetings. All of his tactics were stuff that might work in a business meeting, but for women in the church, they would never work. Get assertive and you get labeled a power grabbing b. Try to get the primary problem on the agenda, and it goes on the bottom where they never get to it because they run out of time discussing the priesthood topics.

[Jeffret]

I have 3 sons and 2 daughters. I have tried to get both as interested in STEM as possible. Two boys took to it without much encouragement from me. One daughter has little interest in STEM. The other daughter I have worked with to coach her robotics team, tutor in math, have frequent science discussions and teach her programming as much as she will tolerate. She is currently in the "Girls Who Code" club at school. The instructors are men, they have asked me to be a guest speaker, I am a man. There were no women at the school willing to instruct the club. I suppose they could reach out to the development community for some women to guest speak, and be more proactive that way, but the fact is, there are fewer women in math to choose from. While I find the poster hilarious, and they certainly should have put some effort into finding some female members for the speaker panel. Maybe they had trouble finding women to participate. Please feel free to ignore the following rant:

<rant>
Certainly the way women were treated in STEM careers by some men 40 or so years ago was really, really wrong. But frankly, I just don't see females being treated poorly or being ignored on an institutional level (there are always ass-hats out there but they treat everyone badly and not targeting females in STEM specifically). Is it possible that our own body chemistry has a bigger effect than socialization does on what is appealing to the genders generally? Is it really important to humanity that we have a 50/50 mix in STEM? No girl should be discouraged from interest in STEM, but neither should any boy. Why not encourage both and let the chips fall where they may?
</rant>

I want to highlight these two pieces, but unlike usual, I don't want to take them out of their context first. And they are deeply connected.

It's true that the BYU Women in Math club had a hard time finding women to participate. According to some reports there is only one woman math professor at BYU. If you look at the faculty page for the Math Department there are 45 people. Five of them appear to be women. If you look at the Permanent Faculty page there are 37 people. Two of them appear to be women. That right there is a huge part of the problem. And why the second statement I highlighted is fundamentally flawed.

I presume that what you meant to say was, "Why not encourage both equally and let the chips fall where they may?" But the problem is that in a multitude of ways they are not encouraged equally. Merely on the basis of faculty ratios in the math department women are starkly lacking in examples. That may not seem like a big deal to us white men, because the default in society in white male. But, it's one of many, many factors that discourage girls and women from going in to STEM. They receive that message in lots of different ways. Studies have shown that teachers give more complimentary treatment to boys. In their peer group, girls are still taught that they shouldn't be good at math or that they shouldn't be seen as smart. All of these other efforts to increase female involvement in STEM are intended to try and balance out some of the already existing vast disparity in how boys and girls, men and women are encouraged. It's still far from equal but perhaps these efforts might nudge us a little bit in the right direction.

And no, there really is not any evidence to support this claim, "Is it possible that our own body chemistry has a bigger effect than socialization does on what is appealing to the genders generally?" That's a favorite claim by those who want to maintain a discriminatory status quo, but there is no backing for it.

[alas]

I have 3 sons and 2 daughters. I have tried to get both as interested in STEM as possible. Two boys took to it without much encouragement from me. One daughter has little interest in STEM. The other daughter I have worked with to coach her robotics team, tutor in math, have frequent science discussions and teach her programming as much as she will tolerate. She is currently in the "Girls Who Code" club at school. The instructors are men, they have asked me to be a guest speaker, I am a man. There were no women at the school willing to instruct the club. I suppose they could reach out to the development community for some women to guest speak, and be more proactive that way, but the fact is, there are fewer women in math to choose from. While I find the poster hilarious, and they certainly should have put some effort into finding some female members for the speaker panel. Maybe they had trouble finding women to participate. Please feel free to ignore the following rant:

<rant>
Certainly the way women were treated in STEM careers by some men 40 or so years ago was really, really wrong. But frankly, I just don't see females being treated poorly or being ignored on an institutional level (there are always ass-hats out there but they treat everyone badly and not targeting females in STEM specifically). Is it possible that our own body chemistry has a bigger effect than socialization does on what is appealing to the genders generally? Is it really important to humanity that we have a 50/50 mix in STEM? No girl should be discouraged from interest in STEM, but neither should any boy. Why not encourage both and let the chips fall where they may?
</rant>

I want to highlight these two pieces, but unlike usual, I don't want to take them out of their context first. And they are deeply connected.

It's true that the BYU Women in Math club had a hard time finding women to participate. According to some reports there is only one woman math professor at BYU. If you look at the faculty page for the Math Department there are 45 people. Five of them appear to be women. If you look at the Permanent Faculty page there are 37 people. Two of them appear to be women. That right there is a huge part of the problem. And why the second statement I highlighted is fundamentally flawed.

I presume that what you meant to say was, "Why not encourage both equally and let the chips fall where they may?" But the problem is that in a multitude of ways they are not encouraged equally. Merely on the basis of faculty ratios in the math department women are starkly lacking in examples. That may not seem like a big deal to us white men, because the default in society in white male. But, it's one of many, many factors that discourage girls and women from going in to STEM. They receive that message in lots of different ways. Studies have shown that teachers give more complimentary treatment to boys. In their peer group, girls are still taught that they shouldn't be good at math or that they shouldn't be seen as smart. All of these other efforts to increase female involvement in STEM are intended to try and balance out some of the already existing vast disparity in how boys and girls, men and women are encouraged. It's still far from equal but perhaps these efforts might nudge us a little bit in the right direction.

And no, there really is not any evidence to support this claim, "Is it possible that our own body chemistry has a bigger effect than socialization does on what is appealing to the genders generally?" That's a favorite claim by those who want to maintain a discriminatory status quo, but there is no backing for it.

Well, there is a little evidence that there are inherent gender differences as far as math and geometry go, but it is very small. And like all "gender differences" the difference between individuals of the same gender is huge, and the difference between genders is like two percentage points. And as far as anything STEM except math and geometry go, there no evidence that men should be at an advantage, yet all STEM subjects are heavily male dominated. When we studied gender differences in psychology, the professor said that if anything, women would make much better math teachers than men, because women's superior verbal ability makes them better capable of explaining math to students. And this was proven by a study. Women were better at story problems and better at explaining what they were doing. That was a bigger difference than between inherent math ability.

The one thing my psych professor said was a gender difference that holds up, is that there are more men at both extremes of the intelligence spectrum. More male supper geniuses, and many more ...well ... at the other end. The Y chromosome isn't as robust as the X, so, males tend to fall at the extremes. That may even account for the higher math score of your "average male," because they test the super geniuses, but don't test those institutionalized with limited IQ.

Anyway, it all comes back to there should be 49 women in math for every 51 men, because men's inherent better ability is less than 1%. In fact, when children are tested before socialization can affect things, like at 5, girls are better at math than boys are. Then about puberty, the boys finally pull ahead. But back in the dark ages when I was in college, the [male] experts thought that the boys pulled ahead because of the different sex hormones that hit at puberty, rather than socialization finally kicks in to make the girls hate it and not learn or test as well.

So, until there are 49 women to 51 men, I would say socialization is the biggest factor for women's glaring underperformance in STEM.

[Red Ryder]

Gender roles aside, it's just plain sad that the Mormon women (member of the BYU Women in Math club) who created the flyer didn't see the irony in it. That's the tragedy in this whole thing.

Most members aren't bothered by the obvious gender inequalities with if the church.

It's not difficult to see!

[Wonderment]

What's funny is that the obvious problem here probably didn't even occur to any men on the project and the women probably didn't dare bring it up for fear of offending the priesthood.

Absolutely right on. I'm sure that is exactly what happened.

[Mad Jax]

Pattern 1: Prove-it-Again. Two-thirds of the women interviewed, and two-thirds of the women surveyed, reported having to prove themselves over and over again – their successes discounted, their expertise questioned.

Doesn't this fall under the subject of hearsay? People question expertise in STEM all the time. It's called peer review, and you either make the cut or you don't. Correct proofs of mathematical theorems are incontrovertible. Correctly performed experiments are proven through repetition. Properly applied technology works.

A few years back I temped for a business called Data Recognition Center which runs complex data sets on student testing. Even the head researchers are questioned regularly by the likes of initiates - like myself - who rewrite their flops to prevent propagation of error and match their sets to hypothesized distributions contrary to their initial assumptions. Every single person in STEM is constantly questioned by one another and better be prepared to be proven wrong at any given moment. STEM is an unforgiving, demanding environment. It's something anybody within better get used to.

So how is one to take such an isolated report absent context? Isn't it possible that those questioned were simply reporting that they get challenged routinely, not considering any positive or negative quality to it? Because I can only consider a high percentage of scientists - male or female - being scrutinized to this level to be a good thing.

My only real issue is the way the article approaches issue number 1, but overall the article focuses on anecdote and only has one visual data set, which I couldn't help but notice is only focused on racial disparity, which was somewhat illuminating, but would have been more germane to the article if it had included males for comparison.

[alas]

Pattern 1: Prove-it-Again. Two-thirds of the women interviewed, and two-thirds of the women surveyed, reported having to prove themselves over and over again – their successes discounted, their expertise questioned.

Doesn't this fall under the subject of hearsay? People question expertise in STEM all the time. It's called peer review, and you either make the cut or you don't. Correct proofs of mathematical theorems are incontrovertible. Correctly performed experiments are proven through repetition. Properly applied technology works.

A few years back I temped for a business called Data Recognition Center which runs complex data sets on student testing. Even the head researchers are questioned regularly by the likes of initiates - like myself - who rewrite their flops to prevent propagation of error and match their sets to hypothesized distributions contrary to their initial assumptions. Every single person in STEM is constantly questioned by one another and better be prepared to be proven wrong at any given moment. STEM is an unforgiving, demanding environment. It's something anybody within better get used to.

So how is one to take such an isolated report absent context? Isn't it possible that those questioned were simply reporting that they get challenged routinely, not considering any positive or negative quality to it? Because I can only consider a high percentage of scientists - male or female - being scrutinized to this level to be a good thing.

My only real issue is the way the article approaches issue number 1, but overall the article focuses on anecdote and only has one visual data set, which I couldn't help but notice is only focused on racial disparity, which was somewhat illuminating, but would have been more germane to the article if it had included males for comparison.

No, that is not what this is talking about. This is a matter of respect, not just normal peer review and making sure that things are replicated. This is a matter of being treated from the beginning like you do not belong. If you walked into a lab to work and found your lab mate was a chimp, you would assume the chimp could not do the work right from the beginning. That is what this is talking about. Disproving the automatic assumption that you cannot do the work. And your male privilege protects you from ever being treated this way. And, yes, I would say that the comparison to a chimp is a good comparison. I got challenged plenty by a good AP English teacher, my papers came back covered in red. But the FEEL of that was totally different than the feel of disrespect and contempt in the all boy but me top in the school math class.

And sure it is anecdotal. But just like the stories of the bishop interviews with kids, how many stories do you need? I was reading yesterday on Sam Young's blog and the arguments by the TBM's who are calling him apostate and pretending that there is no problem sound just like this argument. Basically refusing to believe anything that they have not experienced.

[Mad Jax]

No, that is not what this is talking about. This is a matter of respect, not just normal peer review and making sure that things are replicated. This is a matter of being treated from the beginning like you do not belong. If you walked into a lab to work and found your lab mate was a chimp, you would assume the chimp could not do the work right from the beginning. That is what this is talking about. Disproving the automatic assumption that you cannot do the work. And your male privilege protects you from ever being treated this way. And, yes, I would say that the comparison to a chimp is a good comparison. I got challenged plenty by a good AP English teacher, my papers came back covered in red. But the FEEL of that was totally different than the feel of disrespect and contempt in the all boy but me top in the school math class.

And sure it is anecdotal. But just like the stories of the bishop interviews with kids, how many stories do you need? I was reading yesterday on Sam Young's blog and the arguments by the TBM's who are calling him apostate and pretending that there is no problem sound just like this argument. Basically refusing to believe anything that they have not experienced.

The problem with the article is that it doesn't follow the example of the well conceived and executed research of its first link. In that study, they test to see if there is bias by the actions of the unwitting test subjects and controls. The data is then calculated to reflect what they tested for and the conclusions reflect it.

In their own research intended to bolster their claim, they interview women about their experiences and calculate that data, but they don't then make the claim that women perceive a bias in strong numbers, but rather that the bias is shown to be present, based on the title of the article. This is an extremely poor conclusion and proves that percentages of women think this is happening, but does nothing to prove that it is indeed happening.

The most generous thing I can think of to say concerning the article is that the author's approach to this subject is incomplete. It needs comparison to male counterparts in order to determine if the perception varies significantly across the sexes, and it needs to perform some kind of real double blind to see if there is a disparity in assumption of competency in a similar manner. In addition, it's important to determine if this perception is based on something real, or if it is a result of a phenomenon such as confirmation bias or other logical fallacies. Fallacies which are pretty well understood to be common human responses.

[MoPag]

No, that is not what this is talking about. This is a matter of respect, not just normal peer review and making sure that things are replicated. This is a matter of being treated from the beginning like you do not belong. If you walked into a lab to work and found your lab mate was a chimp, you would assume the chimp could not do the work right from the beginning. That is what this is talking about. Disproving the automatic assumption that you cannot do the work. And your male privilege protects you from ever being treated this way. And, yes, I would say that the comparison to a chimp is a good comparison. I got challenged plenty by a good AP English teacher, my papers came back covered in red. But the FEEL of that was totally different than the feel of disrespect and contempt in the all boy but me top in the school math class.

And sure it is anecdotal. But just like the stories of the bishop interviews with kids, how many stories do you need? I was reading yesterday on Sam Young's blog and the arguments by the TBM's who are calling him apostate and pretending that there is no problem sound just like this argument. Basically refusing to believe anything that they have not experienced.

The problem with the article is that it doesn't follow the example of the well conceived and executed research of its first link. In that study, they test to see if there is bias by the actions of the unwitting test subjects and controls. The data is then calculated to reflect what they tested for and the conclusions reflect it.

In their own research intended to bolster their claim, they interview women about their experiences and calculate that data, but they don't then make the claim that women perceive a bias in strong numbers, but rather that the bias is shown to be present, based on the title of the article. This is an extremely poor conclusion and proves that percentages of women think this is happening, but does nothing to prove that it is indeed happening.

The most generous thing I can think of to say concerning the article is that the author's approach to this subject is incomplete. It needs comparison to male counterparts in order to determine if the perception varies significantly across the sexes, and it needs to perform some kind of real double blind to see if there is a disparity in assumption of competency in a similar manner. In addition, it's important to determine if this perception is based on something real, or if it is a result of a phenomenon such as confirmation bias or other logical fallacies. Fallacies which are pretty well understood to be common human responses.

Thank you for your thoughts on this.

This article was a study, not an experiment.

And women shouldn't have to be part of experiments to validate their experiences. Are you implying that the women who stated that they had to prove them selves over and over again were lying? Or were they just too clueless to understand what was really going on? How would you conduct an experiment to tell if these women are really experiencing what they claim to be experiencing?