She moved from Madison to San Francisco at the age of 20 and worked odd jobs before taking classes for fun at a community college.
Gómez cites the support of Jenny Harrison and Donald Sarason for encouraging her to form relationships with mathematicians outside of UC Berkeley.
[2] Gómez is known for being one of the co-founders of the women's organization The Noetherian Ring at the University of California Berkeley in 1991 while attending as a doctoral student.
In the fall of 2004, she began working at University of Wisconsin–Madison in a non-tenure track position to teach math and direct the Wisconsin Emerging Scholars (WES) program whose goal was to promote retention of minority students in STEM.
[3] In 2006, Gómez cited Wisconsin's passing a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage as a motivation to seek academic employment elsewhere.