Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

IN  WHICH Ross Rheingans-Yoo—a sometime quantitative trader, economist, expat, EA, artist, educator, and game developer—writes on topics of int­erest.

Notes: The Gender Gap in Math
women in stem, mathy, talk notes

"The Gender Gap in Math" presented by the Harvard Undergraduate Mathematics Association

Panel: Gigliola Staffilani (Professor, MIT Math), Rediet Adebe '13 (PhD, Harvard SEAS), Hilary Finucane '09 (PhD, MIT), Alison Miller '08 (Postdoc, Harvard Math)
Moderator: Sarah Richardson (Professor, Harvard Social Studies)

Notes legibility estimate: HIGH

Notes completeness estimate: Incomplete; important, scattered quotes only.

Please assume that everything is at best a loose paraphrasing of what the panelists actually said; in the place where it got really bad, I've noted [paraphrased], but the others aren't always close quotations, either. Many good answers were left off because I'm seriously not that fast at taking notes.

HUMS: Some Numbers

The Harvard Undergraduate Math Survey (May 2014) was organized by Meena Boppana, Kate Donahue, Domniki Georgopoulou, and Caitlin Stanton, with contributions by Rahul Dalal, Ellen Robo, and Isabel Vogt, and advised by Prof. Benedict Gross. It had 130 responses, 55 from math concentrators (1/3 of math undergrads); here are a few of the findings.

Are you made uncomfortable by the gender gap in math?

  • 3% of male responents
  • 54% of female respondents

How many professors do you believe you can ask for a letter of recommendation?

  • Female respondents: 1.0
  • Male respondents: 1.6

Did you compete in math competitions in high school?

  • 80% of male respondents
  • 75% of female respondents

Are you planning on writing a thesis in pure mathematics?

  • 25% of female respondents
  • 50% of male respondents

Are you planning on grad school in mathematics?

  • 65% of male respondents
  • 25% of female respondents

Panel Discussion

Moderated by: Professor Sarah Richardson, Professor of popular gen-ed "Gender and Science: From Marie Curie to Gamergate"

Richardson: Let's get a

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Lynn Conway
awesome people, women in stem

Happy (belated) seventy-seventh birthday to Dr. Lynn Conway, now emerita at UMich, who was dealt a really shitty hand in life and overcame it to revolutionize the field of electrical engineering, literally write the book on VLSI design (along with Dr. Carver Mead, of CIT), and, in the past fifteen years, become a outspoken trans-rights activist. She also rides motocross.

![Photograph of Dr. Lynn Conway](http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/LynnPhotos/Lynn2006.jpg" caption=""Playing is Adventuring is Exploring is Innovating is Designing is Engineering is Architecting is Art."
~Lynn Conway")

When I'm calling out heroes in STEM, I usually say something about the sort of challenges they had to overcome to achieve what they did, but Dr. Conway's story takes the cake. She was born physically male, which, as it turns out, is a really, really shitty thing to happen to you if you're a girl born in 1938. She's written a memoir on her life, which traverses the painfully personal, the fascinatingly technical, and everything in between, in the arc from her early struggles with gender identity; to her career at IBM (cut short when they fired her for transitioning male-to-female); to her subsequent second career-from-scratch at, well, everywhere; to her coming-out and subsequent trans activism. I don't have the words to recommend it highly enough. It's honest, raw, and inspiring -- oh, just read it.

Conway's accomplishments include:

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