The Joint Committee on Women in the Mathematical Sciences (JCW), founded in 1971 as a committee of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), is now a joint committee of seven mathematical and statistical societies: AMS, American Statistical Association (ASA), Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), Mathematical Association of America (MAA), National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). The charge of JCW is "to identify some of the disadvantages that women mathematicians now experience, and recommend actions which those societies should take to alleviate these disadvantages, as well as to document its recommendations and actions by presenting data."

As the number of organizations represented on JCW has grown over the years, it has become increasingly difficult to hold JCW meetings in conjunction with other scheduled meetings and conferences. Members of NCTM and the statistical associations do not routinely attend the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January; the timing and expense of attending such meetings is often prohibitive even for those having an interest in the program. While JCW is able to conduct a fair amount of business by e-mail, this year’s experience confirms that the committee functions most effectively with one intensive, face-to-face meeting a year, held apart from other meetings or conferences.

For each of the years 1994, 1995, and 1996, JCW has held an annual face-to-face intensive weekend meeting at the Chicago-O’Hare Hilton Hotel. In 1997, however, JCW did not hold its annual meeting in Chicago, owing to serious scheduling conflicts on the part of the chair. JCW did hold one small face-to-face meeting on Friday 10 January, in conjunction with the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego. As anticipated, attendance at this meeting was poor. An attempt to schedule a JCW meeting in Baltimore in January 1998 failed utterly: only two members indicated that they would be able to attend.

It is the intention of JCW to resume the practice of holding an intensive annual weekend meeting in Chicago in 1998. In the past, there has been some difficulty in securing travel support for this meeting from the participating organizations. The AMS, NCTM, and ASA routinely provide full travel support for the meeting; IMS has attempted to alleviate the travel support problem in part by appointing representatives who live in the Midwest, for whom travel expenses would be minimal. While MAA has routinely provided support for travel to JCW meetings, it has done so at a level inadequate to allow all four of its representatives to attend. In the future, MAA plans to scale back the number of representatives so that all may receive adequate travel support. AWM, however, has been unable to provide travel support at all.

For many years, the main activity of JCW has been to make recommendations to the various societies to collect, assemble, and publish data concerning the participation of women in the mathematical sciences. By far the most extensive collection, compilation, and publication of data is done by the AMS-IMS-MAA Joint Data Committee, which is published on a regular basis in the Notices of the AMS. In particular, the November Notices has included a one-page summary of ‘Statistics on Women Mathematicians Compiled by the AMS’, which includes information on speakers at AMS meetings, broken down by gender, and a multi-year breakdown of the numbers of women and men receiving Ph.D.s, appointed to the editorial boards of AMS journals, and serving as trustees and members of the AMS Council. In 1996 and 1997, publication of this information was delayed until the December issue. JCW urges the AMS to continue the annual publication of this data, and preferably to publish the information in the same issue each year.

After many years of prompting, the MAA has finally assembled and published a small amount of data on women in the August 1997 issue of MAA Focus. We have received no further updates on data collection and publication efforts underway at ASA and NCTM.

In recent years, the Joint Data Committee has begun a longitudinal study of 1990-91 degree recipients whose Fall 1991 position or address was in the United States. JCW will recommend to the Joint Data Committee that this longitudinal study be continued at least until the end of the century. JCW will also recommend that this information be disseminated biannually in the Notices, the MAA Focus, and the Bulletin of the IMS, and on these organizations’ web sites (with updates at least every two years).

It was agreed at the 1996 meeting that JCW would like to shift its focus from simply requesting data from the societies, to making more active use of the data collected. The Joint Data Committee, for example, collects a good deal more data than it can conceivably publish. With the blessing and assistance of JCW, Marie Vitulli (AWM) and Mary Flahive (MAA) have published a gender analysis of recent employment data, "Are Women Getting All the Jobs?" (Notices of the AMS, March 1997, 338-39). They conclude that "there seems to be little reason for concern that women are getting preferential treatment in the new Ph.D. job market."

Of ongoing concern to JCW is the fact that the data we have seen thus far makes it difficult to determine the quality of the first and subsequent jobs of recent Ph.D.’s. For example, if a new Ph.D. is hired by a Group I school, is that individual in a named postdoctoral position, a tenure-track job, a temporary position with a heavy teaching component, or something else? Are there gender patterns which emerge from an analysis of the quality of these early jobs?

As indicated in our 1996 annual report, JCW would like to undertake more careful qualitative studies of the available data. To do so, however, would be a major undertaking, and it is not clear that the members of JCW have the time to devote to such a study. Perhaps a future cooperative effort between JCW and the Data Committee could lead to a deeper understanding of current gender patterns in employment.

At its brief lunchtime meeting held in January 1997, members of JCW met with two of the Associate Secretaries of the AMS, Susan Friedlander and Lesley Sibner, to discuss strategies for increasing the representation of women and minorities at special sessions of the AMS. Ideally, JCW would like to see special session organizers provided with a list of individuals whose specialties (as indicated by the MR numbers given on their membership forms) match those of the session. Such lists would provide a valuable service to special session organizers and serve the broader purpose of increasing the diversity of session speakers, not merely in terms of gender but in a variety of other ways as well.

Report respectfully submitted by:

Margaret A.M. Murray

Chair, JCW

Date of expiration of the term appears in parenthesis; expiring terms marked with an asterisk (*)

Martha Aliaga (ASA, 1/1998*)

Ann Almgren (SIAM, 1/2000)

Stella Ashford (AMS, 1/1999)

Lily E. Christ (MAA, 1/1998*)

Mary Flahive (MAA, 1/1998*)

Ena Gross (NCTM, 4/1999)

Deborah Lockhart (SIAM, 1/1999)

Harriet Lord (MAA, vice-chair, 1/1998*)

Margaret Murray (AMS, chair, 1/1998*)

Mina Ossiander (1/1998*)

Connie Page (IMS, 1/1999)

Tamar Schlick (SIAM, 1/2000)

Sanford Segal (MAA, 1/1999)

Robert Sibner (AMS, 1/1999)

Tara L. Smith (AWM, 1/2000)

Berit Stensones (AMS, 1/2000)

Marie Vitulli (AWM, 1/1998*)

Patricia Wozniak (ASA, 1/2000)