Anyway, now I totally believe that doing mathematics can help you contribute to the world in various ways. Even though the results I’ve made in my research are small, I still think they are nice, and they might help physicists a very very tiny bit in helping to understand the world, which I think is really cool.

Also, every now and then I’ll read about people doing silly things because they are innumerate (like medical professionals who don’t understand Bayesian statistics or something) and think, “maybe what I know is not so useless after all”. (I think I’d still have trouble convincing my parents of that though).

But I used to think mathematics was pretty useless for anything related to saving the world or making it a better place. It’s not. But perhaps it has a reputation for being so a little. So if people want to attract women to it, as well as a lot of guys, (and that’s if they do, I’m still not sure) then maybe they should try to promote this aspect of it as well.

When I was young, my mom used to tell me that, “when you grow up, you should use your mind to help mankind in some way.” Unfortunately, I think she’s still waiting… But unless I were to do something drastic like switch to medicine and volunteer my time in third world countries, I don’t think I would be helping the world in a tangible way no matter what.

I don’t think anyone can predict what kind of contribution they will make in the long run. Suppose, in the worst case, that you get a job in academia, where you produce papers with little incremental results that are unremarkable, but you have a good time doing it and you inspire your students to pursue careers in mathematics. Would that be sufficient justification for doing it?

The only thing I know for sure is that, of the decisions I’ve made in the past, the ones I’ve come to regret usually involved choosing the pragmatic alternative over the idealistic one. Don’t hesitate to pursue your dreams because they might seem selfish in some way; selfishness can be a virtue.

(BTW, the only reason I saw your comment at all was because Scott recently moved to WordPress and set up an rss feed for the comments, so kudos to Scott for that. On the other hand, there is this little spam problem now…)

Thanks for replying. And thanks for letting me know that feeling dumb is pretty universal. I’ve improved on that front over the years.

You helped me clarify my thoughts: Sometimes the question
“How can we get more females to study math?”

gets instantly changed to

“How can we get more females to want to study math?”

but the questions are really very different, because women don’t just do what they want.

I always wanted to do math (and I knew that I got good enough grades get a PhD scholarship). Making research more enticing wasn’t really the issue.

The thing that held me back was because I still worried as to whether I SHOULD do it, seeing as I felt obliged to contribute something to the world or help society and wasn’t sure I would if I spent my time studying mathematics. I figured it was only okay to study mathematics or physics if you were really really really smart and so would be sure to contribute something. (But then eventually my selfishness won out).

Maybe this isn’t peculiar to women either though. I’m not sure.

I don’t know how women feel, but I can tell you that when I was in grad school, I generally felt pretty dumb and inadequate most of the time. I think that feeling is pretty universal, except maybe for outliers like Scott. When you spend all day studying things that are genuinely difficult to understand, it’s pretty hard not to feel dumb. Perhaps men, on average, are more inclined to ignore those feelings than women are.

Anyway, the thing that’s made me meander and consider not continuing with mathematics is that I worry all the time that I’m too stupid. I always worry that perhaps I never “really understand” things at the same level as the guys from my class.

I initially felt a bit selfish for accepting my scholarship – I felt like maybe I was wasting the money, since I’m am not really good enough at mathematics to contribute anything much. But then I thought, there’s so many worse things I could do… I’m not really hurting anyone (and I didn’t think I was really contributing that much to the world by selling homewares). So I went ahead.

I wonder if feeling like you’re too stupid is common among other women?

I also wish there were more male admin staff. It would be fun to be bossing men around. How come we never hear complaints about gender inequality there?