Abstract
Gender issues in mathematics education received fairly attention several decades ago, mainly because women and men performed differently, with men usually outperforming women. The research on such phenomena originated a series of studies on the so-called ‘achievement-gap.’ After many years of research on the achievement gap, such a gap has shown to have disappeared. However, recent studies have shown that there are fewer women who choose STEM-related fields than male peers. Suppose women are not choosing mathematics, but concomitantly research has pointed out that women and men have similar mathematics capabilities; why are women disproportionately part of the field? Since current statistics show that 90-95% of doctoral mathematics students are men, this study examines why school mathematics is still a male-dominant field. The data presented in this paper was collected using life-story interviews. Freirean methodology was used to analyze the contradictions in women’s PhD student experiences. The findings point to contradictions in women’s experiences in mathematics regarding success and challenges women have faced in mathematics and are discussed in depth in the findings and discussion sections of this paper.
Highlights
Women’s lack of representation in post-high school mathematics is still a topic discussed in many researchers’ work in the 21st century (e.g., Herzig, 2004; Leyva, 2017; Lubienski & Ataide Pinheiro, 2020; Lubienski & Ganley, 2017; Mendick, 2005b; Rubel & Ehrenfeld, 2020)
This research was interested in finding out the nature of contradictions of these women’s narratives that occasioned struggles that tell us the generative themes that shape women’s experience in mathematics
Such work was much needed since there is the only possibility for change in the inequality women live in mathematics if we can find the limit-situations that limit women’s pursuit of freedom in mathematics to “be more” (Feire, 1970/2017)
Summary
Women’s lack of representation in post-high school mathematics is still a topic discussed in many researchers’ work in the 21st century (e.g., Herzig, 2004; Leyva, 2017; Lubienski & Ataide Pinheiro, 2020; Lubienski & Ganley, 2017; Mendick, 2005b; Rubel & Ehrenfeld, 2020). To succeed in mathematics and stay in mathematical careers, women need to overcome a series of oppressive obstacles (Mendick, 2005a; Steele et al, 2007), obstacles that are exacerbated because of the relatively recent (historically speaking) access women have had to education and mathematics These obstacles are understood in their essence by the analysis of the unit of struggles in women’s experience, defined in this paper as contradictions. This study intends to reconstruct how these oppressions are formed, continued, and perpetuated through an examination of contradictions in women’s stories about pursuing a PhD in mathematics This problem is not new, but rather, has occurred throughout at least the last four millennia (Stedall, 2012) in one of the oldest of the sciences (Man-Keung, 2000). This study’s research question is: What is the nature of contradictions that women who are pursuing a PhD in mathematics experience in mathematical spaces and mathematics?
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