Beyond Mathematical Discovery: What Having a Woman Fields Medalist Really Means

There is no Nobel Prize in Mathematics.  And while the Norwegian government has managed to fund a separate prize called the Abel Prize with a similar monetary award and the Israeli government issues a coveted Wolf Prize in the discipline, no mathematical prize means more in mathematics or outside it than the Fields Medal.  The monetary value is only $15,000 Canadian, but the prestige is priceless. This year, for the first time, the Fields Medal, which can be awarded to as many as four people every four years, was awarded to a woman, Maryam Mirzakhani, and awarded to a mathematician from the global south, Artur Avila.  The press is making a big deal of the woman thing and not a big deal about the global south thing, which should not surprise anyone.  The press is also trying to diminish the significance of a woman winning the Fields Medal by stating that no woman has yet won either the Abel or Wolf Prize in mathematics and talking statistics on the sex ratio of Ph.D.s in mathematics.

These prizes are all awarded for mathematical discovery in particular, not pedagogy, compilation of resources, or many of the other things that academic mathematicians do in their work. All but one recipient of the Fields Medal has been an academic.  When you think about mathematical discovery, you think about a bunch of dead white guys having eureka moments in their bath tubs with a crown.  And maybe, if you are the child of mathematicians like me who was the right age in 1994, you think about Andrew Wiles holing himself up in secrecy for seven years to prove Fermat's Last Theorem.  And, if you read the news, you might also think of the one non-academic Fields Medalist Grigori Perelman, who proved the Poincaré conjecture.  Even if you are the child of two mathematicians, you probably don't think about your mother running Maple calculations about complex manifolds while cooking dinner, or a young mathematician taking a break from writing a paper to nurse her child.  And you don't think about how the ability of even a brilliant mathematician to devote the time and energy to amazing discovery and to get the resources she needs is dependent on her gender.  Only 30% of mathematicians are women, and far fewer are tenured faculty at the world's top research institutions.

Before getting to the Fields Medal itself, let me push the other prizes to the side.  The Wolf Prize has only existed since 1978, and it is a lifetime achievement prize.  Its recipients are the authors of your college mathematical textbooks, the provers and conjecturers of Big Theorems, and the founders of new mathematical disciplines.  Among its recipients are many Fields Medalists, and it has no age cap.  This means that the gender bias in its recipients spans not just the last 20 years (assuming start of real mathematical work around age 20) but of the last 50 to 60 - Shiing-Shen Chern received the prize at age 73.  So, when looking at a Wolf Prize awarded in 2014, we need to look at the gender biases in mathematics at least back to 1964.  The Abel Prize has only been in existence since 2001, and despite its 6 million kroner ($1 million US) prize, is not discussed as a goal in mathematics.  Its recipients are mainly winners of the other two prizes, and I think it is still working to establish itself as a legitimate prize, and picking winners helps in that.  It is worth noting that my mother's thesis advisor, Isadore Singer, shared the prize with Sir Michael Atiyah in 2004 for the Atiyah-Singer Theorem, which won a Fields Medal for Atiyah but not for Singer, as singer was too old to win the prize at the time.  Similarly there is no age cut off for the Abel Prize, which is also in the process of making up for its years of not existing.  It is therefore not surprising that it has not yet been awarded to any women.

Now for the Fields Medal, which is awarded for outstanding discoveries by young mathematicians.  For young mathematicians to succeed in quests for discovery, they need to be in the right environment and have support and the time to make their discoveries.  This includes being in a research environment full of other talented mathematicians, usually ones in your own field, and having the support to do independent and collaborative research as well as teach.  Additionally, being able to make mathematical discoveries is not usually a matter of Eureka moments but of extensive contemplation and research, something which taking the time to bear and raise children, even if not taking time off from academic teaching responsibilities, can severely hamper women's progress in mathematicians.  While plenty of men mathematicians spend time raising children and caring for their families, they also have the option of having children later in life (which they do) and passing off care responsibilities to their partners in ways that are not acceptable for women.  The consistent gender imbalance of faculty at elite institutions makes it even harder for women to get the resources they need to overcome these challenges.  Top young women mathematicians are often given excellent positions at 2nd tier schools who are interested in attracting young mathematicians to keep and expanding which fields they have faculty in.  They take these jobs because tenure is hard to come by and they are then set for life.  But it makes incredible discovery harder.

I am hopeful with these latest Fields Medalists.  The inclusion of a mathematician from the global south means that meaningful mathematical educational structures are developing there.  The award going to a woman under 40 at a top American institution means that we are on the way to fixing the gender disparity in mathematics.  If she can now get the support she needs at Stanford, others will be able to as well, and more women will want to become mathematicians.  Programs will have to be more attentive to specific needs and concerns of women.  And maybe fifty years from now, the Fields Medal, the Abel Prize, and the Wolf Prize in mathematics will all be able to be given to amazing mathematicians of many genders on a regular basis.

How The Religious Institute Aims to Improve the Lives of Religious Bisexuals

In my life, I have been seen by others as a straight woman, a lesbian, a gay man, and even a straight man (which still baffles me).  Once people get to know me, they learn that I say I have attractions to people of multiple genders, but they don't often believe me.  When I started dating Mr. Boy, many of my friends who met me after my previous relationship with a man were shocked.  Even though I had stated my bisexuality (for lack of a more convenient term), my friends assumed that was talk and I was really only attracted to women.

In religious contexts in particular, even in otherwise queer-friendly spaces, this invisibility is worse and I have often encountered outright biphobia.  I think part of the reason bisexual invisibility is increased in religious spaces is the focus on finding one person to share your life with (I say one here because religious groups, as a whole, have not caught up to ideas of non-monogamy).  When people are in a relationship, this is praised in religious communities to an extent that erases sexual orientation.  This is particularly true in liberal Jewish communities where the reaction to someone saying they have a partner of the same gender is to ask if that partner is Jewish (another conversation for another time).

The Religious Institute today releases a book-length guide which will improve the experience of bisexual folk in religious communities.  The first resource of its kind, Bisexuality: Making the Invisible Visible in Faith Communities, is a comprehensive guide for religious communities to welcoming and inclusion people who have attractions to more than one gender whether or not they identify as bisexual.  The book asks the reader to consider whether the B in LGBT actually gets heard at her congregation.  Parts 1 and 2 of the book present an overview: Part 1 focuses on what bisexuality is and how people experience it and Part 2 on the justifications for inclusion of bisexuality on religious grounds from a variety of religious perspectives.  Part 2 also contains a brief contextualization of the "problematic" passages about LGBT folks from Tanakh and the New Testament.  The third part of the book outlines how to create a "bisexually healthy" religious community.  And the last part of the book outlines additional resources.  In short, the book attempts to address the issue Emily Alpert Reyes describes in her column "Why Bisexuals Stay in the Closet", which, incidentally, gets quoted in the book (props to friend and fellow University of Chicago Alum).

Suggestions in the book range from the often-overlooked-but-easily-implemented (writing out lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender so that the B isn't functionally silent) to the takes-specific-training-and-is-hard-to-implement, like the model of pastoral care it advocates.  That and the background information in Parts 1 and 2 enable this guide to be used by clergy and lay leaders regardless of prior familiarity with the issue, but also allow those with much experience to go even deeper.  The beginning of the introduction best describes the intricate issues examined in the book:

Imagine the following situations in your faith community:

• A congregant comes to you for pastoral counseling. He is excited, yet distressed that 

although he has always identified as straight, he has fallen in love with someone 

of the same sex.

• You are on the search committee for a new pastor in your community. One of the 

applicant’s profiles states that she identifies as bisexual. 

• A married woman in your congregation finds explicit homoerotic websites on her 

husband’s computer and comes to you for advice.

• A person everyone believes to be gay comes to a congregation party holding hands 

with a person of another sex.

• Two middle school students in the youth group announce that they are bisexual. 

Is your faith community prepared for these situations? Is your faith community open to 

people whose sexuality does not fit into the categories of gay/lesbian or straight? Does 

your faith community have access to resources about bisexuality and bisexual people? 

Even if you think you are good at theses issues, I encourage you to read through this book to see if your practices fall into some of the pitfalls the Religious Institute has identified.  I was surprised that some behaviors I thought were inclusive (hello big many-gender-loving trans guy here) could actually be detrimental.

Things the book does really well:

* Casts a wide net on what constitutes bisexuality that is well-explained.  The authors explicitly state who the guide is intended to help include, even, and perhaps especially people that don't use the term bisexual to describe themselves but experience same and other gender attractions on at least one dimension of sexuality.

* Combats the gender binary by using terms like "another gender" and "another sex" instead of "opposite sex" or "opposite gender".

* Talks about the ways in which bisexuals contribute specially to religious life and spiritual awareness.

* Presents nuanced and well-informed definition of sexuality and accounts of bisexual experience. I love the multiplicity of bisexual narratives in the book.

* Breaks down suggestions in a way that any congregation can start to implement immediately.

Things I don't like about the book:

* The phrase "bisexually healthy".  I assume it is meant to parallel the organization's use of the term "sexually healthy", but I don't think the usage is parallel and I think the term is confusing, even after it is defined.  I would advocate the words "friendly" and "safe" for bisexuals instead.

* The book is extremely monogamy-normative and does not address the issue of how to include and pastor to bisexuals who are not monogamous.  I personally think that the attitudes can exhibit the same poly shaming that is normative in many religious communities.  As a poly ally, this rubbed me the wrong way.

* Christian buzz-word terminology.  Uses of the terms "welcoming and affirming" and "faith communities" that originate or were popularized in Christian contexts present a barrier to non-Christians reading the book.  We would use "inclusive" and "religious communities."

Things that should be improved for the next edition:

* Better representation (particularly resource-wise) of religious traditions other than progressive Christian denominations.  In one resource list, Christian resources are divided by denomination, but no Jewish movement resources are listed.  Instead, there is one sub-header "Jewish" that lists Keshet and Nehirim.  This sort of listing, combined with the Christian-centric terminology

* More testimonials, with special effort to include testimonials of folks who are partnered to someone of the same gender.  Where partners are discussed in personal narratives, they are always of another gender than the writer of the narrative.

* A consistent use of gender instead of sex when the authors do not mean to focus on phenotypic, genotypic, or legal sex.

* Expansion to non-Abrahamic traditions - the book as it is now relies on the shared context for expression of values of Abrahamic faiths and the shared values of the Abrahamic religions.  Many other religious traditions are sexually healthy and would like to be safer, inclusive spaces for bisexual folks, and this guide would not be useful for them.  The authors state that it is intended for Christians, Jews, Muslims, and Unitarians.  But this sort of inclusion is necessary in all religious spaces.

In all, this is an incredibly practical and useful resource, and every religious (or faith, I suppose) leader should invest.  Good work, Religious Institute!

Transgender Day of Remembrance

Even though today has been horrible in terms of my current situtation, I wanted to take the time to remember those who have died because they are Transgender.

Would You Risk Arrest to Get Married?

Indiana law defines marriage as being between one man and one woman.  Indiana law also imposes strict penalties for perjury in marriage applications or for applying for marriage when ineligible and penalties for clergy that officiate at marriages which are done under false pretenses.  These laws have been on the books for years.

However, a new law restructuring Indiana penal code makes it easier to prosecute and convict folks for such crimes starting July 2014.  The practical implication of these changes, given the realities on the ground in my home state, is that the combination of these laws will be used to brand as criminals same-sex couples and the clergy who marry them.  It is a felony in Indiana for people to ask the government to look at a piece of paper.

I wish I could say that since I moved out of Indiana, the shenanigans of the state don't bother me as much as they did when I lived there.  However, they bother me more, I suppose, because I have no say in the matter anymore.

There are obvious objections to the ways the laws work together, and it remains to be seen whether any enforcement measures will be taken based on them.  I wonder if I would risk eighteen months in jail to apply for a marriage license.  Would you?

A Prayer for Queer Folk

אב הרחמים, gender-fuck father whose compassion cradles us like a mother cares for a newborn, we appealed to you in our darkest moments of internalizing the pain the world directs at us.  We cried out to you during beatings in alleys, with our heads in toilets, when our partners and friends died of AIDS, and, of course, when we finally let ourselves be free to enjoy the sex we wanted to have.  We asked you to put an end to our suffering, sometimes by ending our own lives.  We created communities of our own to let your love in when the world told us we were hated.

From the depths of the gutters we slept in when we were kicked out of our parents' homes, we called out to you and you answered us with the great expanse of a friendly drag queen's heel and her hand extended to pull us up and sit us down on the nearest bar stool.  You answered us in the still small voice of a goth girl techie who taught us oh those many uses for gaffer's tape.  You comforted us with show tunes, Gloria Gaynor, and the Indigo Girls.  You gave us the strength of each other which led us to have the courage not only to come into our own but to come out to the world.  You marched with us on Christopher Street and Folsom Street.  You cried with us as we lost amazing women to transphobia, and you learned with us as we developed and refined queer theory.

Some of us had faith in You from the beginning, and some of us still don't have faith in You.  Some of us rejected You when others told us You hated us, and some of us only found You when humanity abandoned us.  You are invoked all around us, but we lost hope in Your deliverance.  We lost hope when people made in Your image killed our brother Matthew Shepard and our sister Rita Hester.  Some of us lost faith but all of us lost hope.  We lost hope when we woke up with survivor's guilt when we survived the AIDS crisis.  We lost hope when kids continued to kill themselves even after Elton John and Ellen DeGeneres came out and so many others followed.  We lost hope when Mark Carson was killed in our safehaven of Greenwich Village.  We no longer knew how to call out to You.  The arc of progress seemed grayscale rather than rainbow. We convinced ourselves You weren't listening, that we just had to wait for humanity to catch up to Your justice and love.  And humanity wasn't looking too friendly.

Our Rock and our Redeemer, you sent us allies, who took up the torch we left at the door of the nightclub.  To us, some of them seemed like strange bedfellows.  However, when we cried that the country was burning they saw that it was not being consumed.  They fought when we were tired, and we took strength from them.  We were devastated when the US Supreme Court destroyed the Voting Rights Act and when they restricted the ability of employees to claim harassment against their employers, and we got angry at people, but not at You because we lost hope when, despite the illusions of progress, we were not safe in our own neighborhoods.  We called on You to guard our comings and our goings, but You seemed to be asleep on the job as our siblings, especially those of color continue to be attacked for walking down the street.

Our Strength and our Salvation, You nevertheless renewed our resolve as we held Pride Parades, Dyke Marches, and Trans Days of Action in our cities.  You allowed us to broadcast that it can be fun, invigorating, and complicated to be queer, but that coming out of the closet allows a person to be surrounded with complex and jovial folk.  As we lamented that Pride has become a spectacle that straight people come to gawk at and a forum for pandering to gay [sic] constituents, we became grateful that we have the privilege to feel that way.

מודים אנחנו לך, grateful are we for You, in the midst of all of this.  We are grateful for how far we have come.  We are grateful that there is more work to do because we have been struggling so long we don't know how else to live.  We are grateful every time we say the words "I love you," every time we see a rainbow - natural or manmade, every time we pass a single-user gender neutral restroom, every time we recognize what someone wants by a handkerchief, and every time we arrive home safely.  We are grateful for the opportunity to remember how grateful we are.

We pray that we may be cognizant of our gratitude constantly.  Knowing dark hours will still come, we pray that we may recognize the joy of Pride Month 2013 when we are enveloped.  We pray that we remain cognizant of our privilege, and that having more equal rights does not cause us to lose our focus on the marginalized members of society.  Appreciating the support we have been offered, we pray for the will to continue to form chosen families and mentorships as the world accepts our presence in more spaces.  We pray for the ability to show others that difference is positive.  We pray to stay queer.

נברך את מעין חיינו חי העולמים שומעת תפילה

Update about an Alexander week

This past week has been difficult for me.  I was confronted with open unapologetic transphobia and the lack of ability of some I considered friends to check it.  I also had to face my inability to speak up for myself when hate was directed at me.  I had a strong ally who spoke for in that situation, but I worried that these friends were complicit in the hate.  The conversation was painful for both of us.

This week as well, I've seen people from within and without the queer community dismiss a friend's queer identity as invalid or at best a choice.  And I have seen this friend's pain because of that and I am angry on her behalf.

I also had a moment yesterday where I realized I was taking a paskn from Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf in order to be an ally and as weird as it was to be cognizant of living Reform Jewish law, it was powerful for me to live into that experience.  Reform Jews are so good about talking about choice and occasionally good about talking about ethical sensibility, but we are horrible at talking about laws and obligations.  Sometimes we not only find actions compelling, but we are compelled to certain action.  I hope to be able to devote a post to this soon.

Men's Group

So this week I went to a men's group for the first time in my life. Growing up, I was always skeptical of any gender-specific spaces, and in many ways, still am. The discussion facilitator for this group, which focuses on what it means to be a young religious man, or something like that, is a woman, so I feel less awkward about the group being somehow "men's only space". However, I think the opportunity to discuss men's issues is not taken enough, either in public or private spaces, so I was curious. I found that the discussion we had was meaningful, and it was not the sort of discussion I have in other contexts. Admittedly, my experience of masculinity and manhood is quite different from that of the cisgendered men in the group, their experiences are actually quite different from each others, as well. The group gives us a place to talk about men's issues, and I think that it could be done with more people who are not men there as well, but the conversation would be very different. There is a certain comfort and ease in sitting with a group of men that enables us to say things that in other contexts, or even in that context, may be inappropriate, but give each other leeway to speak our minds, a leeway which is often not granted in other contexts.