Mary Gray has applied statistical and legal arguments to make recommendations for how governments and organizations can address genocide and other human-rights atrocities, as well as workplace discrimination. Now in her 80s, her career as a lawyer, statistician and mathematician at the American University in Washington DC continues. “In spite of the fact that I have a lot of white hair, I’m not retired yet,” she says.
Some researchers focus on a handful of narrowly defined problems. But Gray’s work is vast in comparison.
She has trained investigators for the International Criminal Court in the Hague, the Netherlands, to determine the extent of human-rights violations and genocide. Closer to home, she has worked to combat sex-, race- and age-based discrimination and to create opportunities in US academia for people from diverse backgrounds.
As founding president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 1971 to 74, Gray established networks and support for female colleagues and advocated for a more equitable and inclusive culture across the discipline. In 2022, when the association established its Mary and Alfie Gray Award for Social Justice — which is named after Gray and her mathematician husband, who died in 1998 — the organization described Mary Gray as having “lived her life in the pursuit of mathematics excellence and social justice”. Alongside her academic research and teaching, Gray has volunteered with both Amnesty International and Statistics Without Borders, an organization that provides pro bono statistics and data-science services to improve human welfare worldwide.
Why I made a river my co-author
Several years after publishing her PhD thesis on abstract mathematics (titled Radical Subcategories) in 1967, she had a realization. “I was never going to, I would say win a Nobel prize, except there are no Nobel Prizes in mathematics,” she says. Instead, she found a natural fit when asked by colleagues to work on some statistical problems about whether there was sex or race discrimination in the selection of White House fellows — young professionals undertaking work-experience placements at the highest levels of the US federal government. So she bolstered her background in statistics and decided to focus on “more practical applications”, she says.
Many researchers would be satisfied with dual expertise in mathematics and statistics. But it was one issue — inequitable retirement benefits for men and women — that fuelled Gray’s decision to earn a law degree.
Becoming a lawyer
In the 1970s, while Gray was examining the retirement benefits she was offered through the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association (TIAA), which handles retirement benefits for many professors in the United States, she noticed sex discrimination. “When you got an annuity from the TIAA, there was a difference in what was paid out for men or women,” she recalls. If a man and a woman had the same accumulated amount of retirement funds and were retiring at the same age, the monthly payments that the man would receive would be 15% more than the woman’s. And, Gray says, the argument from the insurance company was that women will live longer, so they will eventually get more payouts and everything will be equal.
When Gray didn’t accept that reasoning, the insurance company stated that she didn’t understand the law. Her retort was to go to the Washington College of Law at the American University, where she graduated in 1979 as one of the top students and then joined the Maryland State Bar Association.
Eventually, Gray helped to end those discriminatory policies in retirement benefit packages. She and an economist colleague, Barbara Bergman, contributed their published research and expert testimony to a 1983 US Supreme Court case. In Arizona Governing Committee v. Norris, the country’s highest court ruled that discrepancies in retirement plan benefits for men and women were illegal on the basis of sex discrimination.
Gray and her colleague’s basic argument before the court was statistical. “If you look at the normal distribution of when people die, you would find that there are two normal curves: one for men and one for women,” Gray says. Those curves have about 86% overlap, meaning that a large number of people are likely to die inside the same age range regardless of their sex, she notes. In other words, women aren’t guaranteed to outlive their male colleagues.
Looking back, Gray is glad that she chose to study mathematics before later pursuing legal training. “I’m glad that I did it all, but I think for me, it was more productive than it would have been the other way around,” she says. It would be helpful if more mathematicians and statisticians cross-trained in legal scholarship and vice versa, she notes. When human rights or lives are at stake, having both numbers and the law on your side can help to strengthen arguments, she says.
Mary Gray was inspired to pursue a law degree after uncovering sex-discrimination in US academics’ retirement benefits policies.
Perseverance meets problems
Char Mollison, a specialist in the management of non-profit organizations at the Center on Nonprofits, Philanthropy, and Social Enterprise at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, describes Gray as “mission-driven” and “not driven by self-aggrandizement”.
The two met in around 1980 through a women’s rights organization called the Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL). Mollison was serving as WEAL’s executive director, and Gray was the elected chair of its board. Gray had a reputation for “getting women into mathematics” and “she was often an expert witness in class-action lawsuits promoting equity for women”, Mollison says. She was impressed with Gray’s ability to encourage collaboration and respectful dialogue while keeping the group from getting stuck in endless debates about divisive public policy and legislative advocacy issues.
“In an advocacy organization like WEAL, you have all kinds of points of view about what to do next,” Mollison says. Board meetings could become heated as the group discussed what compromises it might need to make to bring about desired policy or legal changes. Mollison says that Gray was known as a fair and empathetic listener, but she also kept the meetings — and votes — moving. “She knew that as an organization, we had to make a decision and move forward.”
