What is your field/job?
I manage research and data at a child advocacy nonprofit. We focus on policies and systems that affect children, especially those in poverty and children of color. I gather and analyze data to track child well-being in different regions and for various groups of children throughout the state, share research and data with our policy team to help determine our priorities and respond to various policies, and develop reports for policymakers and child advocates.
What lead you to that field/job?
A rather long road with a lot of twists and turns despite always knowing that doing advocacy work was my goal. I grew up with a strong interest in politics and passion for addressing inequality and inequity. My parents were very active in the 1960s and 70s and I have always been interested in systemic problems. Also, throughout my life I always have felt happiest in communities and in cultures that frown upon exclusion.
I, like most people, got sidetracked along the way. My parents were high achievers and I felt a lot of pressure to be academically successful. It wasn’t until my third year in my public policy PhD program that I realized how unhappy I was trying to please my professors and others around me instead of myself. When you are in graduate school, it is easy to feel pressure to conform to specific definitions of success and to hold certain values. However, becoming a faculty member at a large research university was going to be too different from the type of on-the-ground, more collaborative environment in which I thrive. So when I graduated, I unconventionally immediately pursued a job at my current organization – a nonprofit that shared my philosophy and values. PhD students are not really trained for this type of career, but I frequently use a lot of what I learned in graduate school and I’ve also worked with some great and patient people who are always willing to teach me something new.
Did you experience any push-back or specific encouragement from teachers, parents, mentors in pursuing this field or other fields because of your gender?
Given my experiences, I have a long answer to this question. I always wanted to pursue advocacy and I thought that the analytical training of a mathematician would help me better understand and analyze policies. As a result, I was a math PhD student before ultimately finishing my PhD in public policy.
When I was majoring in math as an undergraduate, I had some fantastic mentors. My professors all really believed in me, made it a point to make sure I believed in myself, and while I felt a bit isolated without a lot of women around, my undergraduate experience was very different from when I entered graduate school.
In my incoming math PhD cohort, I was the only American woman among 23 graduate students, and there were 2 (maybe 3?) other women from China. The second I walked in the building I felt people staring at me.
I had a crew of friends (all men from the US – the language barriers were prohibitive in getting close with some of the women), but I always felt like a huge outsider. When you’re THE woman in a classroom, everyone is staring at you, and let me tell you how hard it is to do math when everyone is staring at you. I had never had math anxiety in my life but now felt frozen. And I had no colleagues to talk to about this. As an aside – years later, I got into research on how stereotypes affect math performance among stereotyped groups.
I had a couple of professors who seemed to believe in me, but none who sought me out to ensure I knew what I was actually capable of like I did in college. Instead, I often heard male graduate students and professors warning each other about the dangers of being alone with a woman in their offices and how to prevent unfair allegations; the irony is that I also heard way too many conversations rating the attractiveness of female students.
The experience caused me to reevaluate what I wanted to do, and I left the field of math with a masters degree and pursued an MPA and ultimately a PhD in public policy. Even though policy has so many more women, the field is still male dominated and rewards stereotypically masculine behaviors. The culture is very competitive and less collaborative; for example, faculty must work on research articles on their own (and be single authors, or at least the first author listed if they work with others) to get promoted, and faculty are significantly less rewarded for their service (which research shows female faculty are more likely to focus on), nurturing students, and teaching contributions.
This system can be seen in how faculty interact with graduate students; instead of nurturing students and assuming everyone can succeed with the right support, many faculty expect some students to fail due to an inherent “inability” or “lack of drive” (and, unfortunately, certain types of students are more vulnerable to this stereotyping). Not all faculty are like this, and I was lucky to have an advisor (and committee members) who focused a lot on mentoring students and believed in all of them.
In addition, the big, prestigious conferences were filled with mostly white men who were not typically open to meeting new people; I mentioned this to faculty in my department who said that conferences were for professors who hadn’t seen each other in a while and wanted to catch up and not as much for meeting new people; they said that graduate students can be annoying when they introduce themselves. I understand their perspective, but this has the consequence of making conferences feel like a “boys club”.
I ended up discovering that a less prestigious, newer conference was my place. I met so many mentors and I’ve learned that happiness is more important than prestige. People there loved meeting new people, and they focused much more on studying issues of systemic inequities, even if this was a more “subjective” approach to policy that couldn’t be mathematically quantified into some model to show off.
Also, I’ve learned how math is used in many fields as a weapon to marginalize people who “can’t” do it, even if the field’s success depends very little on math. Academia is a wonderful place where people continue to solve some of the world’s greatest problems, but it also attracts people who want to show (to themselves and others) how capable and intelligent they are (with the mistaken idea that mathematical ability measures intelligence).
First, this causes people to do all kinds of research that does not actually make sense (or solve the problem they are interested in) because that kind of research is seen as prestigious and makes them look smart; for example, I often see people creating really complex mathematical models when they are not needed. In contrast, in my department, the trained mathematicians and statisticians who were comfortable with and confident in their math abilities were the most open to unconventional models that were not necessarily mathematically exciting but shed some great insights into some persistent research problems.
Second, I saw a lot of people use math as a means to create status and hierarchy. If they see someone who cannot do math, instead of assuming she can learn how to do it, they decide that she is just inherently incapable of being a good researcher. I wish that more people realized how much math performance depends on context and circumstances and that often people from more marginalized populations may appear to be worse at math but really either haven’t had the classes/background/social capital or are facing math anxiety because they are from a stereotyped group. These assumptions about inherent math ability can keep perfectly capable women and people of color out of PhD programs who, with the right support, could be great mathematicians and also offer some much needed diversity for solving problems.
What do you like about what you do? What is a good day/week/experience for you professionally?
I love that no day is the same. Because the policy world is constantly changing, I’m always learning about new policies and research and data about them and the groups affected by them. My work always feels important, especially examining data broken up by race, or poverty-level, to see how different groups of children are doing and being served by various systems. My favorite part of my job is sharing research and data with policymakers or decision makers and sometimes seeing that I’ve made a small difference.
Can you identify any challenges currently in your field that are specific to you being a female?
I’ve been told many times throughout my career to hide my more feminine characteristics. I’ve been told that my clothing is inappropriately sexual, and I’ve been sexually harassed, but in some ways the hardest part for me was when I was critiqued for not being competitive enough. While sometimes necessary, I do not always buy into hierarchical structures. I also know my more informal and self-deprecating nature makes me seem less impressive than if I had stereotypical male traits that exude more confidence.
What do you do when you find yourself in a situation that feels sexist or threatening?
My responses to sexist behavior have changed. I’ve always been more outspoken about systemic change than when I am the individual experiencing the sexism directly. A few years ago I experienced some harassment and complained to friends and my harasser, but never made a formal complaint (a man who sat next to me at work kept commenting on my appearance, told me he sent my picture to his friends so they could see how I looked, and kept asking me to dinner, among other issues). Sometimes, it is too easy for me to question myself but I am getting better at trusting myself if I feel uncomfortable and feel that I’m not being treated with respect. Standing up for myself can be uncomfortable – I often don’t feel like drawing this kind of attention to myself and, to be blunt, I doubt standing up for myself helps for promotions – but I have learned that I am happier and have more self-respect after I advocate for myself. Otherwise, I reinforce the completely incorrect idea that I am not worth advocating for and it is awful to feel that way.
How do you manage fears of professional or personal retaliation when you push back against sexist or threatening professional interactions?
I wish I had a good answer for this. I’m sure there are resources available to help answer this question but I have not yet found them and could certainly use that kind of help!
Do you communicate with other women in your field?
There are a lot of women in the non-profit world but fewer in data analytics and policy modeling. I helped start the Columbus, Ohio branch of R-Ladies, which is a group for women who use R, which is software used for data analysis, modeling, visualization, etc. In the math world, there were too few women to really even gather enough people to start a local group.
Do you have any advice for women entering your field now?
Asking others to treat you with respect and in ways that make you feel valued as a human being is not too much to ask for.
Lady Words 