Harvard’s math department has a long history of gender imbalance. Hu says she would have deleted the message had it come from “just another” male professor-but getting an email from a woman was different. Hu changed her mind about Math Table when a female preceptor sent an email over a Math Department list-serv encouraging students to sign up for the program. “So I was just terrified to do anything.” “Every time I read the abstract, it was always men and they were always doing really super pure math,” Hu says. “All students, irrespective of their mathematical backgrounds, are strongly encouraged to attend and/or to give talks,” the site reads.īut, in almost four years at Harvard, Math concentrator Jennifer Hu ’18 never considered speaking. The Math Department website urges everyone to come. “That’s a huge problem, and I think that exemplifies a lot of the issues we’re having.” ‘It Was Always Men’Įvery Tuesday at 5:30 p.m., a handful of Math students and faculty head to the Mather House private dining rooms for “Math Table,” an optional, informal meeting at which department affiliates present their research and solicit feedback. “Talk about unwelcoming-when you have a department that is literally kicking you out of what is supposed to be a community space to talk about and work on mathematics,” Glazer says. But she calls the experience a reminder of the work that remains to be done. Since the installation of the plaque, Glazer says, no one has tried to evict her or any woman she knows from the lounge. In an email, Kronheimer acknowledged there was once an “issue” with student access to the Math Department common room, but called it a “situation that is now well in the past.” Administrators installed the plaques after undergraduates complained department staffers disproportionately removed women from the lounge. Two plaques hang on the wall of the math common room. It reads: “The Department of Mathematics respectfully asks that the Common Room be used only by members and guests of the Department and undergraduate concentrators.” By the end of the semester, they convinced administrators to stop policing the room and instead hang a new, silver plaque just above the coffee table. In September 2015, Glazer and a few other students began meeting with members of the Math Department about the common room. Students, too, have taken steps to address these problems, including founding a group- Gender Inclusivity In Mathematics, now two years old-specifically dedicated to making women feel more welcome in the department and to “reducing the gender gap” in math at Harvard. “It has done so before, and will continue to do so, now and in the future.” “When criticism is offered, or difficulties become apparent, the department must act and must seek to address the problems wherever it can,” Kronheimer wrote in an emailed statement. In the last few years, the department has offered senior professorships to at least three women-none of whom accepted the offers-and has stepped up efforts to recruit female graduate students. Kronheimer, who served as the chair of the Math Department until July, says the Department is aware of its gender issues and is working to resolve them. The department has since changed its common room policies, and students say the environment has improved-but affiliates point to the removal of female Math concentrators from their own department lounge as typical of a broader Math Department culture that disadvantages women.Ĭurrent and former students and faculty-male and female-say the department’s dearth of female faculty and graduate students creates a discouraging environment for women undergraduates that women in the department are often told to take easier classes than their male peers and that, in a department dominated by men, everyday faculty-to-student and peer-to-peer interactions leave women feeling conspicuous and uncomfortable. The incident-according to more than 20 Math Department affiliates, many of whom shared stories identical to Glazer’s-is not an isolated one. Glazer says she believes her gender prompted the administrator to ask her to leave the room. Glazer '18, a joint Mathematics and Statistics concentrator, sent a survey to math students at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, and MIT to gauge student opinion on department community.
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