Jean Gibbons

Jean Dickinson Gibbons, Russell Professor Emerita of Applied Statistics, University of Alabama

Reading Sastry Pantula’s reflections of his early associations as an Asian with the ASA community inspired me to reflect on my own early experiences as a female in a predominantly male profession in the 1960s and ’70s. To accomplish this, I have to start at the very beginning, in 1954, when I matriculated as a 16-year-old freshman at Duke University.

To the total dismay of my family and friends, I was determined to major in mathematics with a minor in economics. In those days, the men and women at Duke had separate campuses. Because of my major, I had to take a 10-minute bus ride followed by a long trek to the math/physics building on the men’s campus to attend most of my classes. I almost always enjoyed the distinction of being the only female in the class. William Hotelling was one of my classmates; I only learned much later he was the son of the statistician Harold Hotelling.

In my junior year and as part of my economics minor, I took a graduate class in business statistics using the books by Mills and Croxton and Cowden. It was the only course on campus with the word statistics in its title. I learned a lot about index numbers, time series, and compound interest and only a little about hypothesis testing, but I really enjoyed the class.

In my senior year, I took an elective class in business law taught by Gerald Gibbons because my father was a lawyer and circuit court judge. At the end of that semester, Professor Gibbons and I were married in Duke Chapel. I took his name, much to my later regret. (Note to females: Always keep your maiden name!) He convinced me to start graduate school in math at Duke when I was 19.

At the end of that year, we both got teaching jobs at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, and started saving money to continue graduate study. I happened to see a flier on the bulletin board for a National Science Foundation (NSF)–sponsored summer institute in statistics at North Carolina State University. Thus, began my love affair with statistics.

The next summer, I attended another institute sponsored by NSF at the University of Florida and took a class in nonparametric statistics from Herbert A. David, who later became my major professor when I earned my PhD at Virginia Tech in 1962 at age 24.

We had saved enough money to go back to graduate school that fall if we both got scholarships. Only a few universities offered the JSD law degree my husband sought, and he applied to all of them. Since we did not know which university would support him, I had to apply for scholarships that would be honored at any US university. I found only two, offered by General Electric and the Southern Fellowships Fund; I was offered the latter. My husband got a scholarship at Columbia University and I followed him there to take statistics classes.

A little later, I wrote a letter to Boyd Harshbarger, then chair of the statistics department at Virginia Tech, asking if I could transfer all my graduate credits to VT and earn my PhD there. He agreed to waive the residence requirement if I came to VT for that summer, passed the written and oral comprehensive examinations there, and wrote my dissertation there with Herb David. And so my husband actually followed me for a change, but only for one summer.

My husband took a position teaching at the University of Cincinnati Law School in the fall and I followed him, teaching in the math department while writing my dissertation. When I flew to Virginia to defend my dissertation a year later, Herb David met me at the airport in Roanoke and had me stay at his home in Blacksburg for two nights. My husband completed the requirements for his JSD at Columbia that same year and accepted a position teaching at Rutgers Law in Camden, New Jersey.

I applied for jobs at Drexel and Penn in Philadelphia. Only Drexel responded with an invitation to interview; the dean suggested I stay at his home since unaccompanied young ladies did not stay in hotels in those days. At the close of a highly promising interview, I asked for time to walk around the area. A few blocks away, I presented myself at the office of Parker Bursk, then chair of the statistics ­department at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. I inquired whether he had received my application letter and he said yes, he had, but they did not hire females, especially married ones who would just get pregnant and quit. (You have to remember there was no affirmative action or birth control pill in those days.) I begged him to give me a chance, and we had a very promising interview. I received offers from both schools and accepted Penn.

When I walked into a class of all young men on my first day at Wharton, one of the men said, “Here comes a curve breaker.” Were they surprised when I walked up to the podium and began calling the roll! I taught a probability class in the math department, and Fred Mosteller’s son was enrolled.

During my time at Penn, I was exposed to some of the best scholars in the country and was a very apt pupil. My mentors, especially Morris Hamburg and Don Morrison, stressed the importance of being active in the ASA in addition to publishing. I presented my first paper (based on my dissertation) at a regional ASA meeting at Harvard in 1963 and was quite impressed to meet the talented composer/comedian Tom Lehrer at the mixer afterward. I reviewed papers submitted to The American Statistician, attended all ASA annual meetings, served on several ASA committees, and ran for national office (and won!) as representative at large to the ASA Board of Directors. The day I learned I was awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor at Wharton was one of the happiest days of my life.

Unfortunately, my husband was then offered a position as director of the Alabama Law Institute and professor of law in Tuscaloosa. It honestly never occurred to me to do anything other than follow him there, even though it was the fifth time. I decided to make the best of a bad deal and strive to be a big fish in a small University of Alabama (UA) pond (excluding the football pond), rather than a little fish in the prestigious Wharton pond.

One of my early ASA activities was to chair the first Committee on Women in Statistics (COWIS) and convince the ASA Board to pay for publishing a roster of women in statistics to help organizations that needed to hire a statistician to have access to names of females that would enable them to meet affirmative action requirements. It was a pathetically slim roster, but it was a start in encouraging females to enter the profession.

After a short while, I became disenchanted with the activities of COWIS and Caucus for Women since I disagreed with some of their goals. I considered myself to be a statistician who happens to be a female, as opposed to a female statistician. The difference is quite subtle, but it works for me. And so I sought other means of breaking the gender barrier. I contributed a chapter on statistics to a book titled Nontraditional Careers for Women, published in 1972.

About this time, my husband decided he needed a woman who would stroke his ego more than a wife, so we divorced. I became chair of the graduate program in applied statistics at UA and encouraged female students to pursue careers in the field. I did the same through my activities on the Southern Regional Committee on Statistics. I participated in the ASA Visiting Lecturer Program, visiting smaller colleges in the South to encourage undergraduates to pursue graduate study in statistics. I actively pursued potential co-authors for writing scholarly books and articles and succeeded beyond my wildest dreams with distinguished statisticians from places like Stanford and Harvard.

I wasted no time in my private life and soon married John Fielden, dean of the business school at UA. He encouraged me to continue to be active on many of the important ASA committees, including constitutional revision and continuing education. I was chair of the 135th anniversary meeting of the ASA in Boston and served three more terms on the board of directors.

These activities brought national recognition that led to my testifying before Congress and in jury trials as an expert witness in statistics and becoming a Fulbright/Hays scholar at the Indian Statistical Institute in Calcutta. I did contract teaching for the Department of Defense at the Army Logistics University in Fort Lee, Virginia, during several summers. The sixth edition of my acclaimed book, Nonparametric Statistical Inference (1st edition 1971), now co-authored with Subhabrata Chakraborti, appeared in January 2021, published by Taylor & Francis.

One of the most gratifying experiences I have ever had was being elected an ASA Fellow at age 34. However, every experience I had in the ASA was wholly rewarding and I would not trade them for anything. When you give your time to the ASA, you get back more than you give. I will be forever grateful to the ASA and am bequeathing money to them to fund graduate scholarships in statistics at any university in the US.

I am also eternally grateful to VT for waiving the residence requirements for me. I am thrilled that VT has decided to name their graduate program after me. I fund scholarships there for PhD students.

Jean lives in Vero Beach, Florida, and would love to hear from friends, colleagues, and former students at jdfieldenb111@gmail.com.