Here's an easy sum: if 94% of maths professors in British universities are men, what percentage are women?
No need to crack Fermat's last theorem for that one: the correct answer is indeed 6% — a depressing figure just revealed in the first gender survey of UK mathematics departments. The study, commissioned by the Women in Mathematics Committee of the prestigious London Mathematical Society, has exposed the dispiriting truth that no numerical sleight of hand can disguise: maths boasts one of the most skewed gender balances of any university subject.
Things start off relatively positively: girls make up 40% of A-level maths students (though fewer take further maths), and the proportion studying for a first degree in maths is even a little higher, at 42%. But the subsequent trajectory runs broadly downhill, with numbers falling away to just 29% of female researchers, 19% at doctorate level, and the 6% handful who bag a professorship.
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The figures confirm the blunt observations of the 2010 International Review of Mathematical Sciences, which effectively named and shamed the UK's record on women in maths at university level. "Compared to other countries, the overall proportion of women is strikingly small," noted the report, warning that the low priority given to gender diversity would be damaging to the country's future research excellence.
Committee chair Gwyneth Stallard – who is also that rare beast, a female maths professor (at the Open University) – says women are choosing to study maths as never before; the problem is one of career progression once they get a foot on the academic ladder.
Dr Christie Marr, deputy director of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge – one of the world's leading mathematical research centres – believes the drop-off in women's numbers is less an issue of direct discrimination than of that familiar story: the difficulty of maintaining a career after having a family. Maths, she notes, is an ever-changing field where new research emerges constantly and those who take a break can struggle to recover ground. "In maths you go off and have kids and when you come back, the landscape has changed. It's a hierarchical subject where every layer builds on earlier layers, so it can be extremely difficult to catch up.