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May 12 is International Women in Mathematics Day. A day celebrating all the contributions of women in the field of math and sharing a date with the birth of the Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, the first woman to win the Fields Medal. This award recognizes the contributions of mathematicians under the age of 40, and Mirzakhani won it thanks to her contributions in the field of geometry and dynamical systems. But she’s not the only woman who’s changed the course of math! In this article, we will introduce you to some of them, try to better understand why there are fewer women studying math and explore what educational institutions can do to reverse this situation.
Women and Math: What Is the Root of the Problem?
Let’s start with some unsurprising data: in computer science, 86% of enrolled students are male, according to a study by the SIIU (the Spanish Integrated University Information System) this year. In engineering, men account for 74%, and in mathematics and statistics, 64%. Now, let’s look at the other side: 82% of nursing students are women. In psychology, they represent 76%. In medicine, women now account for 69%. And pay attention, in Early Years education, they make up 92%.
Amaya Mendikoetxea, Equality Delegate of the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE) and one of the contributors to the study, points out that the gender gap widens when we look at theoretical fields. For example, physics has fewer women, but the inequality is even greater in theoretical physics. Mendikoetxea also speaks about the perception that theoretical thinking is a domain reserved for men.
When the study was presented, Mendikoetxea also provided a historical perspective and explained that when women started studying at university a little over a century ago, they did so mainly in areas that perpetuated women’s roles within the family and society, that is, areas related to care.
I don’t know what you think, but after giving it a lot of thought, two ideas come to mind. On the one hand, if one thing’s for sure, care is vital: someone who understands the needs of the body and soul and provides logistic, physical, and emotional responses to meet them ensures the survival and well-being of the members of society. On the other hand, we also know that women have moved beyond the confined role of caregiving and, therefore, today we can study what we want simply because we want to. But wait, have we overlooked a small detail? What if mathematics were also a care-oriented career?
Math Heals
I have a background in Linguistics. If I had stuck with what I was taught in school, I would still think that mathematicians only engage in extremely difficult, abstract calculations, disconnected from real life. Now, after three years of working with Laura Morera, Albert Vilalta, Marc Caelles and so many other Innovamat colleagues, I know that math and life are one and the same. And that without math, there’s no art. No music. Not even philosophy. And it goes without saying that there would be no biology or medicine, either. No physics, no chemistry. Now I know that math seeks beauty and makes the world a better place. And look, that has a lot to do with care. From a philosophical, almost spiritual perspective, math contributes to caring for the soul. And from a more utilitarian perspective, math contributes to caring for the body: without mathematics, there is no medicine, nursing, or biology, all careers predominantly chosen by women and related to caregiving.
So, many more men than we think engage in caregiving through math. And if school and high school taught what math truly means, perhaps many more women would be attracted to it. As Edward Frenkel said in his bestseller Love and Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality (2015):
What if you had to take an art class in which you were only taught how to paint a fence? What if you were never shown the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci and Picasso? Would you appreciate art? I doubt it. […] Obviously it sounds ridiculous, alas, this is how math is taught, and so for most of us it becomes the intellectual equivalent of watching paint dry. While the paintings of the great masters are accessible, the math of the great masters is locked away.
More Female Role Models Are Needed in Math: The Leaky Pipeline
There’s a lack of role models and, therefore, a lack of horizons.
Have you heard of the leaky pipeline? We explained it in detail in the article “Girls and Women in Sciences”. There we highlighted how women have equal or greater representation than men in the early stages of their research careers (predoctoral studies), but few reach the highest ranks (professor/researcher). And we also talked about the problem of representation: if there are no role models, female students cannot find someone to identify with. Society denies them the possibility of getting there.
Dear reader, how many female mathematicians do you know? Just think about it for a moment.
Done?
Hopefully, Hypatia came to mind. Or, if you’ve seen the movie Hidden Figures, you may know Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician. But Hypatia and Katherine Johnson, two powerful role models, are not enough to fix the leaky pipeline. And that creates a vicious cycle: If there are no role models, students internalize the idea that mathematicians are men (Pythagoras, Newton, Archimedes, Euclid, Euler, Gauss, etc.). This means that fewer girls have math on their university and career radar. And, if fewer girls study math, it will continue to be difficult to find female representation that inspires future generations.
But wait a minute: what if we deny the premise?
Why this obsession with women doing math? At Innovamat, we are staunch advocates of mathematical conversations. And a mathematical conversation, like any exchange, benefits from diverse perspectives. As Maria Montessori, another strong advocate of classroom conversation, once said: let’s not be afraid of large ratios because they generate richer conversations in the classroom. The more sensitivities there are, the better. So, with more female mathematical perspectives, the conversation would be enriched, because sensitivities and areas of interest would multiply. Not inviting women to the party is denying the voice and perspective of half the population. That’s how we end up sending a woman to space with 100 tampons for a six-day trip.
The Role of Teachers in Encouraging a Female Perspective in Math
So if we agree that the world would benefit from women studying math, what can teachers do? Maybe it all boils down to teaching real math. Teaching that math is about challenges, problem solving, conversation, connection, observation, and creativity. And to do that, we must use all the tools at our disposal. One of the most important tasks teachers face is to open different doors to our disciplines, because we already know that not all students come in the same way.
So, our mission is to build different doors for students to use. In the world of math, there are students who enter through manipulation, others who prefer abstraction, and perhaps others who enter through stories. At Innovamat, we are convinced that narratives and storytelling are very powerful doors to enter the world of math. As a study by Zazkis and Liljedahl in 2009 pointed out: storytelling was presented as a means to create a classroom where math could be understood and enjoyed.
True to this principle, at Innovamat, we have created a fictional series for Middle School, framed within a narrative that integrates the biographies of relevant mathematicians, both men and women, throughout history. It’s an ode to math. We start small—anecdotes, personal experiences, vulnerability—in order to establish emotional connections because it’s easier to approach knowledge through emotion. In fact, we already know that learning without emotion is hardly possible.
Those who know us are aware that we have also introduced storytelling in Early Years and Elementary, but let me talk to you today about the storytelling in Middle School. The series we have created features Sam as the protagonist, a fifteen-year-old student who feels completely disconnected from math. But, of course, she feels that way because she doesn’t truly know what it’s about. Like me when I was a student. Perhaps like you, dear reader. Or like many students around us, no matter their gender. One day, Sam wakes up in a strange world, surrounded by mathematicians from history, and through their biographies and discoveries, she embarks on a journey to discover who she is and her place in the world.
Female Mathematicians Who Have Changed History
In Sam’s Journey, the protagonist is accompanied by different figures from the history of mathematics, many of whom are women. So, guided by Sophie Germain, the students discover the story of a mathematician who worked with prime numbers but had to disguise herself as a man to publish mathematical texts. And with Ada Lovelace, they are amazed to find out that the first computer program in history was created by a woman. And when they learn that this woman was also a lover of poetry and art, they’re blown away. They also discover Florence Nightingale, who made significant advancements in nursing by finding an efficient way to communicate her statistical results from a field hospital. They learn how Katherine Johnson had to overcome racial prejudices, or how Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian mathematician and the first woman to win the Fields Medal, made major breakthroughs in hyperbolic geometry and worked on the floor with huge rolls of paper, to the point that her daughter thought she was a painter, not a mathematician.
That’s why, because we believe in the transformative power of stories, I’d like to finish with some biographical snippets of the female mathematicians who accompany Sam on her journey. Their lives, sometimes full of poetry, sometimes filled with prose (like ours, in fact), can serve as a springboard for the present and future of our female students. Come in, come in.
Hypatia
Hypatia was a Greek mathematician, philosopher and teacher. She lived in Alexandria, Egypt, in the 4th century A. D. The daughter of the mathematician Theon of Alexandria, she became the principal of the Neoplatonic School of Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and math.
Hypatia made important contributions to mathematics, especially in the areas of algebra and geometry. Thanks to later references, we know that she wrote several influential works, although, unfortunately, they were lost. Her most well-known work is the commentary on Ptolemy’s Almagest, where she addressed aspects of number theory and geometry.
Sophie Germain
Sophie Germain was born in France in the 18th century. She made significant contributions in several fields of mathematics, but above all she is known for her contributions to number theory.
She learned math on her own since during the time she lived, it was difficult for women to access scientific education. That’s why she signed her research and theories with the male pseudonym Antoine-Auguste Le Blanc, allowing her to communicate with other mathematicians. She studied relationships between prime numbers and, today, there are special primes known as “Sophie Germain primes”. These are prime numbers where their double plus one is also a prime number.
Sophie Germain was also a pioneer in the study of Diophantine equations and contributed to the proof of Fermat’s theorem in cases with an exponent of 5. Her work was recognized during her lifetime, and she was the first woman to receive a prize from the French Academy of Sciences.
Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer who lived in the 19th century. She is considered the pioneer of programming, as she wrote the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine, Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine”. Through her work, Lovelace saw the potential of the machine not only as a calculator but also as a generator of music and images. She explored the idea that it could be programmed to process any type of information.
Lovelace’s contribution was essential in understanding the potential of programmable machines and influenced the evolution of computing. Ada Lovelace is an iconic figure in the history of computing, as she opened the door to a new era of technology.
Florence Nightingale
Florence Nightingale was a British nurse in the 19th century. She was one of the founders of modern nursing and also made significant contributions in the field of statistics and public health.
Florence Nightingale used her skills in mathematics and statistics to analyze the health data collected during the Crimean War. She demonstrated that the majority of deaths among soldiers were not due to war wounds, but rather to unsanitary conditions in military hospitals. She presented her findings in statistical graphs, using what is now known as “Nightingale’s rose diagram” or a “polar area diagram”, which is a way to visualize data in a circle divided into unequal sectors.
Her analyses had a significant impact, and she is considered a pioneer in the use of statistics to improve public health.
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician and physicist, born in 1918, who worked for NASA for over 30 years. She was part of the “human computers”, a group of female mathematicians who performed complex calculations for the early US space programs. Her work was instrumental in the success of space missions, including the flight of the first American astronaut to orbit the Earth, John Glenn, and the Apollo 11 mission, which took the first crew of astronauts to the Moon.
Johnson overcame the racial and gender barriers of her time to become one of the most important mathematicians in history. Her work was recognized with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor bestowed by the government of the United States.
Maryam Mirzakhani
Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician born in 1977. She was the first woman to receive the Fields Medal, thanks to her contributions to geometry and dynamic systems. Mirzakhani developed new mathematical tools for studying complex geometric shapes and solved problems in the theories of Riemann surfaces.
Her work was recognized internationally, and she received numerous awards and accolades during her life, which unfortunately ended in 2017 due to breast cancer. Mirzakhani was also an advocate for women in science and worked to promote scientific education among women and girls, especially in Iran.
By bringing visibility to the women who have made significant contributions to mathematics, perhaps we can achieve the most important goal: that female students become familiar with their achievements and keep them in their realm of possibilities. Because that’s what education is all about, isn’t it? To teach about the world and its possibilities and to remind students, no matter their gender, that they have the right and the duty to understand it, enjoy it, and make it better.
