Strength in Numbers: A summer program gives a boost to women going for Ph.D.'s in mathematics
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, 18 July 2003, by Robin Wilson, on the web at
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v49/i45/45a01001.htm
About a dozen young women cluster around tables in Room 211 of Pomona College's Millikan Laboratory on a cool June morning. Five of them, barely able to keep their seats, take turns applying theorems to prove a mathematical statement, stopping at each twist in the problem to write the results on a blackboard.
One of the students, Monique L. Richardson, nods her head. "I feel like I've got something," she announces, giving a high-five to a student sitting across the table. "I'm on a roll!"
These young women were among the brightest in their undergraduate math departments. Two of them have already spent a year in graduate school, and 11 others have been accepted to graduate programs this fall at places like Rice University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Maryland at College Park. For them, this month at Pomona is unique: It is likely to be the last time in their mathematical careers that they are surrounded by other women.
They are here because the number of women who eventually become mathematicians is astonishingly low. Only a small proportion even makes it to graduate school, and many of those few soon drop out.
Professors estimate that at least 50 percent of the students who enroll in math Ph.D. programs never earn degrees. Women in the field are particularly at risk: In 2002, 42 percent of the undergraduate mathematics majors in the country were women, but only 31 percent of those who earned Ph.D.'s in math that year were women, according to the American Mathematical Society. And only 13 percent, or 127, of those who earned doctorates were female U.S. citizens. In the professoriate, in 2000 only 17 percent of those tenured in math at four-year institutions were women.
Over the past 25 years, a profusion of programs has tried to turn the numbers around by helping girls and undergraduate women feel comfortable in the male-dominated field.
The women here are part of a four-week boot camp called EDGE -- Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education -- sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Aimed at helping women survive graduate school in mathematics, it is believed to be the only math program designed for women who have already received college degrees. The program continues to counsel them throughout graduate school.
(The rest of the article is on the web at the
above URL.)
