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Navigating Personal and Professional Life

As mentioned earlier, for the nineteenth-century women with academic careers in science, the professional and domestic spheres were completely disjoint. Almost all academic jobs open to women were in the women's colleges, and it was assumed that a female professor was single. If she married, she had to quit her job. This was not challenged until 1906, when a physics professor at Barnard College refused to resign when she announced her engagement to be married. ``I think it is a duty I owe to my profession and to my sex to show that a woman has a right to the practice of her profession and cannot be condemned to abandon it merely because she marries. I cannot conceive how women's colleges, inviting and encouraging women to enter professions, can be justly founded or maintained denying such a principle.'' But the trustees countered that a married woman should ``dignify her home-making into a profession, and not assume that she can carry on two full professions at a time'' [13].

For contemporary women, the story is of course quite different. A wide variety of women have pursued mathematical careers, each with a very different story to tell. Each has navigated a distinct course through her personal and professional life. Some have had children, some have not. Some are single, some are married, many have had more than one spouse or partner. They came to mathematics in various ways and at different points of their lives, from as early as elementary school, to as late as graduate school. Most have experienced both supportive mathematical environments and less hospitable ones. But for almost none was there an obvious, natural path, one that easily fused their professional and personal lives. Virtually none had role models or examples of women who had ``made it'' in mathematics. In this way, most of these women were pioneers, forging a path that would accomodate the multiple aspects of their lives. For a few this was not problematic, but for most, being a pioneer meant dealing with periods of alienation, confusion, doubt, conflict, and compromise.

What is most striking in studying the lives of women in mathematics, now and in the past, is the lack of a traditional pattern. Few followed the standard path that is clearly outlined for male mathematicians: undergraduate major in math, graduate work, post-doc, tenure track job, tenure, full professor. There are certainly cases of men who do not follow this norm--notable examples include Persi Diaconis who began as a magician, and skipped undergraduate work; and Ramanujan, who had very little formal training--but these are exceptions. With women, the exceptions are the ones who follow the traditional, linear path. For a variety of reasons, women's lives are more accurately characterized by a kind of veering and tacking [14]. Although from the outside this is often seen as a lack of commitment, from the women's perspective, it is their way of accomodating the many pressures, needs, and desires of their lives. Often personal issues must be resolved before a woman is ready to immerse herself full-time in research. For some, this means entering a long-term relationship, for others it means having and raising children, or caring for dependent adults.

In addition to personal issues, professional factors have also prevented women's careers from following a traditional pattern, factors that women were not in a position to control. These include overt obstacles, such as nepotism rules, as well as subtle ones, such as not being seen as a serious mathematician because of one's sex. One prominent research mathematician was not able to work with the professor most suited to be her advisor because he thought she should be a high school teacher and would not take her seriously as a mathematician. In addition, a woman is often invisible in the math community and can have more difficulty forming connections with the main network of researchers in their field [15].

All of these factors, both personal and professional, affect the timing of women's lives. If we look, therefore, at the ``time-line'' of a woman's life--what she accomplishes when--it can look quite different from that of her male colleague's. Such differences in time-lines can give rise to difficulties in being accepted as a ``real'' mathematician.

In studying lives of women mathematicians, what emerges is a picture of a wide variety of time-lines, rather than a single standard. Joan Birman, a topologist at Columbia University/Barnard College, did not get her Ph.D. until she was forty years old. Lenore Blum returned to mathematical research in her forties, after years of teaching at Mills College and involvement in national programs to promote women in mathematics. Mary Ellen Rudin, who managed to stay professionally active even while raising four children, is finding that she is doing some of her best work in her fifties and sixties, now that most of the children are grown. She worked part-time as a lecturer until she was almost fifty, when the University of Wisconsin promoted her from a lecturer to a full professor. Judy Roitman did not decide to pursue mathematics until she was already enrolled in graduate school in a logic and methodology program. Though she had always enjoyed math, she had been given messages all her life, both subtle and not so subtle, that women didn't do math. Vivienne Malone-Mayes taught in a small Black college for years before having the courage to pursue a Ph.D. in math, a path that many in her community thought was absurd for a black woman, and certainly not practical for getting a job.

Clearly, each of these women had to ``compose a life'' of her own. These are examples--and there are many others--of women who succeeded. But there have also been many talented women who were not able to fit their unique lives into the world of mathematics, often because their life time-lines did not mesh with what is expected of a mathematician.

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