Case Study: Women in Mathematics Research Outreach Event

Audience group: Sixth Form or Junior College

Audience interest level: Receptive, Engaged

Topics: General maths

Origins of the Project

Although the number of young men and women studying mathematics at university is balancing out, it is still the case that fewer than 10% of mathematics professors in the UK are female. To inspire young women to consider a career in research mathematics we organised the first “Women in Mathematics Research” day for local year 12 students hosted at the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester in June 2018. The event was open to all students, regardless of gender, but for the reasons above we were particularly interested in encouraging female students.

To showcase successful female role models, all of the speakers and volunteers at the event were female mathematicians. The event included plenary talks by Professor Victoria Gould (York) on “My Career as a Mathematician” and Dr Isobel Falconer (St Andrews) on “Female Mathematicians Throughout History”, and concluded with a keynote talk by Dr Helena Stage (Manchester) on “Rationalising Chaos”. In addition, there were several parallel workshops run by local and external mathematicians at different stages of their careers relating to aspects of their research. The students were free to choose which workshops to attend and time was also factored in to the workshops for the mathematicians to say a bit about their careers so far and allow students to ask them questions.

 

Practicalities

The funding sources for the initial event in Manchester were: * Dr Demi Allen’s EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellowship Outreach Budget, * Dr Elizabeth Buckingham-Jeffery’s Prize money from the 2017 “I’m a Scientist get me out of here” competition, * Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Outreach Funding, * Further Maths Support Programme (now Advanced Maths Support Programme).

The event was hosted at the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester and the day began with a brief introduction to the event from Professor Louise Walker. This was followed by two plenary talks. The first of these was “My Career as a Mathematician” given by Professor Victoria Gould from the University of York, who talked mainly about her career (the journey to professorship) and pursuing mathematics to higher levels beyond school. The next talk was on “Female Mathematicians throughout History” and was given by Dr Isobel Falconer from the University of St Andrews. Isobel talked about some lesser known female mathematicians who had made some great contributions despite often being faced with rather challenging circumstances. Rather sadly, some of the mathematicians Isobel discussed had essentially been written out of history because they were women.

After the first two talks there were several workshops on different areas of mathematics presented by female mathematicians from various places and at different career stages. The students picked which ones they wanted to attend and each workshop was given to smaller groups of 5-10 students.

 

The day was ended by a final plenary talk on some applied mathematics entitled “Rationalising Chaos: A mathematical approach to the untameable”. This final talk was given by Dr Helena Stage who at the time was a PhD student in the School of Mathematics at the University of Manchester.

One of the things we asked all of the speakers to do (for plenary talks and workshops) was to devote a little bit of time to discussing their career so far and to allow students to ask them any questions about that.

 

The event was advertised by Abigail Bown (the local AMSP area coordinator) advertising to her school contacts with a couple of our personal contacts also used to reach out to a wider range of schools. In the end there were around 45 students plus around 10 teachers from in and around the Manchester area at the event.

Similar events were organised in 2019 again at the University of Manchester (for year 10 and year 12 students) and at the University of Bristol (for year 12 and 13 students). In 2020 the events were postponed/cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, but there was an online event in 2021, organised by Abigail Bown at the University of Manchester, which was an iteration of the original Women in Mathematics Research event.

Evidence and Recommendations

The aim of this event was to inspire (particularly female) students that a career as a research mathematician is something they can aspire to. We used a standard AMSP feedback form to collect feedback from the participants.

In addition to learning about areas of mathematics not encountered at school, the students really appreciated “being able to ask lots of individual questions” due to small group sizes. When asked what the most useful aspect of the day was, one student said “hearing about women who have achieved something in worse conditions than we have nowadays has inspired me to handle being in a male dominated job” while another commented on “meeting all these amazing mathematicians” and the “empowering atmosphere!”.

More information

Details of the 2019 event on the University of Manchester website

Information about the 2019 event in Bristol