Women in Math
By: Julia Smoot
When considering the idea of gender discrimination in STEM fields, many picture a scene of a woman being continuously harassed or told that she was not nearly as smart or qualified as her male colleges simply because of her gender. While this certainly was a common reality for many female mathematicians at one point in time, modern day gender discrimination has a much different look. There is a reason that my AP calculus class was composed of 75% women and by the time I was taking Linear Algebra I was one of 3 women in the class (6%). The STEM fields are occupied by enthusiastic girls in the grade school years yet they seem to drop out rapidly as graduate school approaches. It stems from a simple yet deeply ingrained idea, men are logical and excel in fields like math and science, women are empathetic and are more keen to literature and the arts. The fact that this bias is so prevalent even if people do not consciously believe it is one of the many reasons that the STEM fields, and math in particular, have such a poor retention rate for women in higher education. In her book Delusions of Gender, Psychologist Cordelia Fine examines the fact that men and women earn bachelor’s degrees in mathematics at approximately the same rate; however when you look at the gender demographics of people who receive PhDs in Mathematics, only about 20% are women. That number drops below 10% when considering mathematics faculty at colleges and universities.
New York City psychologist Catherine Good attributes this gender gap in part to what she calls “stereotype threat.” Good conducted an experiment on students taking a college level Calculus class. The men and women in the class had approximately the same scores on their examinations and homework. Good gave all of the students a test composed of GRE math problems. The students took this test in two groups with one small difference. One group was told that this test was meant to measure why some people were better at math than others. Even though a gendered stereotype was not explicitly stated, it was implied that women are the ones who generally perform worse in math. The men performed equally in both conditions while the women in the stereotype threat condition scored 11% lower than women in the control condition. Good attributes this difference to the fact that the women were hyperaware of a threatening stereotype which impacted their performance.
Heuristics are mental shortcuts that we use to reduce our cognitive load. The availability heuristic can be particularly harmful when it comes to marginalized groups. If you were asked to picture a mathematician you’d probably imagine someone who looks like Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein rather than Emily Noether because that is the most common example that your brain has stored under the category “mathematician.” One of the ways that Fine suggests we can reduce stereotype threats is through representation. So to help combat this stereotype threat and our flawed availability heuristic, here are just a few women who left their mark on the field of Mathematics.
1. Hypatia (355–415 C.E)
Hypatia was a leading mathematician, philosopher, and astronomer of her time who lived in Alexandria (Egypt). She is credited with the astrolabe used in ship navigation and instruments used to measure the density of fluids. She also contributed to the advancement of geometry and number theory.
2. Emily Noether (1882–1935)
Northern was a German mathematician and pioneer in the field of Modern Algebra. She was an English teacher in France but was fascinated by mathematics. She chose to study at University of Erlangen and received her PhD with a dissertation on algebraic invariants. She worked as a research assistant at Erlangen and lectured under the name of one of her male colleagues. In 1918 she discovered the Lagrangian (which may be familiar to those of you who’ve taken multivariable calculus) and her observations between physical systems and conservations laws (Noether’s Theorem) granted her admission as a lecturer in 1919. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 many Jewish professors, including Noether, were dismissed from the university. Norther moved to the U.S. and became a visiting professor at Bryn Mawr. Upon her death in 1935, Albert Einstein wrote “Noether was the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.”
3. Katherine Johnson (1918–2020)
Johnson enrolled at West Virginia State University at age 18, and became the third Black person to receive a PhD in Mathematics and one of the first Black students at the newly integrated graduate school of West Virginia State. She took a position in the computing department of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). In 1953 she moved to a position at NASA and provided flight analysis for NASA’s first human space flight (Freedom 7). Johnson also contributed to calculations that helped sync Project Apollo’s Lunar Module. By the end of her 33 year NASA career she was an author on 26 research reports and had worked on the Earthly Resources Technology satellite and space shuttle. In 2015 President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “She died on Feb. 24, 2020. NASA Administrator James Bridenstine said, “Our NASA family is sad to learn the news that Katherine Johnson passed away this morning at 101 years old. She was an American hero and her pioneering legacy will never be forgotten.”’
