Interdisciplinary Identity Crisis

I’ve written before about being a Math and Womyn’s Studies major, mostly focusing on the how important the intersection of the two fields are to understanding the gendered nature of academia as well as why there may be fewer girls in math and sciences as a result of societal structures directing gendered bodies into specific fields.

In the second meeting of my class, Introduction to Statistical Theory, we continued to review probability, and my professor brought up an example of Simpson’s Paradox. In brief, this is when statistical trends of data sets reverse when you separate or combine specified factors. We analyzed the UC-Berkeley sex-bias case, where a lawsuit was filed against Berkeley’s graduate program on the basis of sex-based discrimination in admissions. The impetus of the case relied on the fact that womyn were being admitted at lower rates than men, which was true . However, when the specific graduate programs became a category of analysis, an explanatory trend was revealed. Womyn were applying to “harder” graduate programs, ones with lower admission rates regardless of sex, disproportionally to men, who were applying at higher rates to “easier” graduate programs– presenting Simpson’s Paradox.

My teacher, a statistician by training, expressed in previous classes that statistics and probability are necessary skills not possessed by many people, and consequently, mistakes are made leading to inappropriate conclusions. In this case, it was the womyn’s rights’ activists who didn’t have statistical training and jumped to the conclusion of sex discrimination within the admission department at Berkeley. My professor went on to explain the importance of statistics to avoid these annoyances to our society, using a myriad of other examples in news reports or medical research.

I don’t think my professor was writing off the womyn’s movement or claims of sex discrimination as statistical misunderstanding. However, I felt uncomfortable in class. I wanted to provide context to sex-based discrimination in college admissions and why even if this specific claim wasn’t true, countless social factors that steer certain groups of people away from higher education do exist. Even though these laws of probability proved that discrimination didn’t exist in this particular structure of admissions, there are much broader psychological, social processes where discrimination is a real phenomenon, and at times, impossible to identify by means of statistical analysis. My emotional response to this class example felt internally fervid, yet totally insignificant to the context of my classroom. I didn’t say anything, and I don’t know why. Womyn’s Studies traditionally teaches you to advocate for a greater understanding of our sexist reality, and I take this initiative as a critical part of who I am, but a logical math student is also who I am. And math doesn’t devote time to deconstructing the gendered nature of logic or the math classroom.

This internal conflict brought me to the following question: does my orientation to the world change completely depending on what textbook I have in my hands, which classroom I walk into?

This question is intimidating to me. Is there a possibility to pursue a career or future that is equally mathematical and feminist, or will one component become the noun and the other a weak adjective, reversed to describing my thoughts and not actions? I think these concerns are very relevant to education, and finding space to have interdisciplinary discussions will be difficult, but I see it as necessary to the objectives of both disciplines.

(Photo by LSE Library under a Creative Commons license)