As we all know, Scientific American is changing from a popular-science magazine into a social-justice-in-science magazine, having hardly anything the science-hungry reader wants to see any more. Its website is worth a look. I recommend that you browse it and find articles that inspire you. The rag now focuses on inequalities and human diseases.
There have been some very serious op-eds in the last few months. Here's one more. It is not as bad as others but, especially for a science magazine, it is riddled with unexamined assumptions. Click the image to see it. Evidently, the racial reckoning which began last year has now been incorporated into mathematics.
It raises two questions after I've read it: Is mathematics structurally racist or not? Scientific American has changed its mission to publish flawed ideologies rather than science pieces.
This article claims that mathematics is rife and misogyny-ridden, which explains why so many black and female academic mathematicians are employed.
The article opens with stories about the three women mathematicians. All of them report feeling discriminated against, or worse, looked down upon. They all have academic jobs: two are professors, one is a postdoc. While I don't doubt their stories, we only have three anecdotes. These anecdotes are a good representation of academic math's racism and sexism. However, these are cherry-picked examples that show little other than that math can be influenced by bigotry as with all fields. Two anecdotes were also obtained easily. First, I asked Professor Anna Krylov (a USC theoretical and computational quantum chemicalist) if she had ever experienced this. She replied as follows. I quote her with permission, weve already met Anna.
I was often the only woman in a room, but that didn't matter. It didn't stop me from being passionate about the subject. McWhorter says that there were times when I was discriminated against, but it didn't stop me from being passionate about the subject. These stories [from Sci. These anecdotes [from Sci. These are exaggerated and misrepresent the current climate.
These narratives don't reflect her own and she worries that they encourage a victim mentality among women. Anna is not anti-feminist either. She was instrumental in initiating a protest at a conference against an all-male speaker agenda.
Anna also mentioned a female math professor in the U.S., who shares her experience. We have two stories on one side and three on the opposite. (I must add that I felt inferior during graduate school and was constantly worried about my future. But, I realized that I could create my own niche.
Crowell also cites two instances of racial discrimination against black mathematicians. However, these were in the Fifties and the early 20th Century. It is undeniable that there was academic racism at that time. Anna stated that there was once and now. We must do better than accepting that mathematics is now structurally and misogynist with an endemic culture that promotes inequities.
The article goes beyond academic data and adds the following:
While racism, sexism, and other forms of systematic oppression do not exist in mathematics alone, many people within the field continue to deny that they exist. Sawyer said that one of the greatest challenges in starting a conversation about this problem is how difficult it can be because mathematicians believe math is the most pure of all sciences. However, statistics on mathematics are hard to ignore. According to a New York Times article, Edray Herber-Goins, a Black math professor at Pomona College, found that only 5.85 percent (29.1%) of the 2,012 doctorates in mathematics and statistics awarded in the U.S. in 2019 were given to women. This percentage is slightly lower that in 2010, when 29.4 per cent of doctorates in these areas were awarded to women (467 of 1,590). These numbers are not grouped according to gender but sex. The survey didn't report the gender of any individuals who identified as other genders.
This is Kendi, the idea that inequalities in achievement are prima facie evidence for bias. It is not true if this is true for both African-Americans and women. This is an example of asking the wrong question. We assume that math is subject to structural racism and misogyny, and therefore the lower representation is the result.
As we have discussed, there are many reasons for inequities, and you cannot assume their existence. (As I stated, there are sexist and racist mathematicians. The claim is that the field is rife with bigotry.
Concerning women, we have learned that there are differences in the interests and preferences of both sexes. Men are people people, while women are people people. These differences, however, are not indicative traits. Lee Jussim, in an op-ed in Psychology Today, points out that while men and women perform well in math at the high school level, women are better at reading and verbal skills than men. This means that women excel at all subjects, but are often more proficient in math than they are in words. This, along with other preferences, can lead to inequalities. As Jussim writes,
Wang, Eccles and Kenny (2013) approached the same topic of divergent interests in a different manner. Disclosure: Eccles was my dissertation adviser and long-term collaborator. I'm pretty certain she identifies herself as a feminist and has been dedicated to fighting barriers to women's rights. She is also one of the most objective and balanced social scientists that I have had the pleasure of knowing. They found: 1. Strong math and verbal skills were more common in girls than in boys, with 70% of them being stronger than their male counterparts. Strong math skills, but not strong verbal skills, were twice as common in boys than for girls; Regardless of gender, people who only had strong math skills in high school were more likely than other students to work in STEM fields by age 33. Regardless of gender, people with strong math and verbal skills were less likely than those who had only strong math skills to work in STEM fields at 33.
Inequalities in math could be due to differential preferences or other factors that are not influenced by bigotry. This may explain why Sci. Am. Am. This indicates that women have a slightly lower attrition rate than men. Something that must be addressed. However, this is not a sign of misogyny.
Concerning African-Americans, the number of doctorates in mathematics is way too low. This does seem to be a sign of racism. But this is racism from the past and not from today. Because of the inequalities in opportunity, blacks are almost certain to have difficulty gaining entry into mathematics studies. This is an issue that has been affecting the pipeline since its inception. It needs to be corrected. The figures again do not prove that the low output at the terminus of the pipelines is due to racism.
Scientific American is now extinct. It is performing performative wakefulness.
Another thing: MathSafe is an American Mathematical Society-hired organization that polices meetings like a beagle sniffing for impurities. It's almost as if we no longer have the ability to police our own behavior in meetings and must pay others to do so.
h/t Anna
