Women, it’s time to make yourselves count

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One of our aims at Learning, Science and Society is to advance the cause of women in science and education. The systematic denial of opportunities to them, as a direct result of ignorance and prejudice, has impoverished all humankind. Never forget-any system of prejudice will mean second rate people in first rate jobs at sometime, somewhere. Imagine where the United States of America would be now if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 presidential election!

We’re going to take opportunities to highlight the progress of women in the fields of Learning, Science, and even Society (how’s that for a plug?) and today we are proud to start with: May 12th, Celebrating Women in Mathematics. There are going to be over 100 world wide events, many online of course, looking at the problems and opportunities for women in mathematics. And is there a problem to solve! Laura Moreno Iraola of El Pais gives us an excellent summary of it for Spain, which is fairly representative of more advanced countries. Get this: only 35% of trained researchers in maths are women, and in the higher reaches, representation is down to 15%. Hmmnn- isn’t the proportion of women in the population nearer 50%, or have we got that wrong? And here’s another little problem, according to Laura: only 5% of citations in science are from women researchers, and a miserable 1% in technology. No wonder girls don’t go into it-they’re invisible!

If we’re going to solve the problems of the world, we need to unlock all that hidden talent-it will make all of us richer in the long run. Progress ids being made in many countries, and we post Laura’s article below: for the few of you who don’t speak Spanish, get your Google Translators on to it. Anyway, she does it much better than we could, so it’s worth a peek.

-Coda: Why May 12th? well it’s been chosen for the birthday of Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, the only woman in a hundred years to win the Fields Medal, which is like a Nobel Prize for mathematics. It is sad to record that she died in 2017.

-Coda to the Coda: we, the editorial board of LSS, were hopeless at maths, truly dire & dreadful.

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-05-12/por-que-necesitamos-un-dia-de-las-mujeres-matematicas.html

#womeninmathematics #elpais #maryammirzakhani