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From: apak@oddjob.UUCP (Adrian Kent)
Newsgroups: net.women,net.singles
Subject: Re: career vs. relationships
Message-ID: <1225@oddjob.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 4-Mar-86 15:01:25 EST
Article-I.D.: oddjob.1225
Posted: Tue Mar  4 15:01:25 1986
Date-Received: Fri, 7-Mar-86 02:19:03 EST
References: <11785@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <660@rti-sel.UUCP>
Reply-To: apak@oddjob.UUCP (Adrian Kent)
Distribution: na
Organization: U. Chicago: Physics
Lines: 29
Xref: oddjob net.women:7032 net.singles:8311
Summary: 

In article <12125@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> weemba@brahms.UUCP (Matthew P. Wiener) writes:
>In article <527@cisden.UUCP> john@cisden.UUCP (John Woolley) writes:
>>When I was majoring in math at the University of Colorado, about two thirds
>>of us students, undergraduates and graduates, were women.  The professors
>>were mostly men, though.
>Here at Berkeley about 35% of the undergraduates, 15% of the graduates,
>5% of the post-docs and visitors, and 2% of the faculty in the math
>department are women.  I've seen several graduate classes with 0 or 1
>female students.
>>So maybe the stereotype is mistaken?  (They are occasionally, I've noticed.)
>>Or was CU really abnormal in this respect?
>No and yes.  There are good female mathematicians, but not many.  Only one
>has had the ultimate honor: the eponymous adjective 'noetherian' has become
>so common one has to check one's context for its meaning.
      I agree with Matthew Wiener that, at present, women are grossly 
underrepresented in math. When I did math at Cambridge the figures were, if
anything, worse than the Berkeley ones. But I've noticed, perhaps wishfully,
a mini-trend of outstandingly good young female mathematicians. (One
egregious example is a girl(*) at Oxford who's just taken
a math B.A. in two years, and got double the marks of the next candidate(**).)
I believe that math, more than most subjects, requires confidence and 
positive feedback to encourage development, and those are hard to acquire if
your teacher (at high school even more than at college) doesn't expect you
to be any good. Once that changes, so will the gender imbalance.
                                          Adrian Kent
					  
(*) I use the term deliberately. She's 13.
(**) I know exam marks are not a perfect predictor of great research. But 
nobody who's taught her doubts that she'll be very very good.