On Saturday, September 24, Gioia de Cari performed her one-woman show Truth Values: One Woman’s Romp through the Male-Dominated Maze of M.I.T. at the Theatre of the Arts. Truth Values is an award-winning autobiographical piece that narrates de Cari’s alternately funny and frustrating experiences as a math PhD student at MIT in the 1980s. The Waterloo performance of Truth Values was co-sponsored by Women in Math, the Faculty of Mathematics, and the Faculty of Engineering.
Truth Values is, in part, a response to remarks made in 2005 by then-Harvard president Lawrence H. Summers in which he claimed that the underrepresentation of women in math and science careers was due to innate biological differences. De Cari shares her struggles with mental health, her frustration over institutional and interpersonal sexism, and her ultimate decision to leave MIT early with a master’s degree and pursue a career as an actor and musician.
De Cari premiered the show in 2009 at the New York International Fringe Festival, where it won an Overall Excellence Award for Best Solo Show. She has since performed True Values over a hundred times, frequently using the performance as a conversation starter for public discussions of gender bias in STEM. In this instance, several faculty, staff, and students from Math and Engineering joined de Cari after the show for a panel discussion on gender bias against women in STEM. To read more about the panel discussion and Truth Values, check out the full story here.