Female Participation in the Study of Mathematics: The US Situation

Abstract

Within a relatively short span of years, we have moved from the presumption that women would never do anything in which mathematical knowledge was relevant to a situation in which — at least nominally — all fields are considered open to women. As late as the 1940s, females were barred from the study of advanced mathematics and physics in some US secondary schools. In the 1960s, the US National Science Foundation sponsored special summer programs for secondary school students to which female students were not admitted. As late as the 1950s, a large proportion of the women who were recognized as creative mathematicians in the US were unemployed (Helson, 1971). Against this background, it is remarkable that women students of mathematics are now doing so well. There is little reason to believe that remaining gender differences reflect innate differences in cognitive ability. US society, and the US mathematical community in particular, should avoid discouraging girls and women from the study of mathematics by suggesting that they are incapable of it. The objective record suggests that they are very capable, without any need for special treatment or sex-segregated classrooms. Since the under-representation of US women in mathematics now begins at the point of transition from undergraduate to graduate study, academic departments of mathematics should be examining themselves to determine whether their attitudes and advice to women students are responsible for this fact. It is not accounted for by the lower rates of participation of women in graduate study generally. Today the primary women and mathematics problem in the US may be that people keep talking about the women and mathematics problem.