Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Women In Math

Over a year ago on her blog Tanya Khovanova mentioned the numerical outcome of googling "male mathematicians" and "female mathematicians."  So I just did the same and similarly found a heavily-weighted favoritism toward females:

"male mathematician" --- 3420 hits
"female mathematician" --- 8990 hits

At first glance of course this seems peculiar given the preponderance of male mathematicians in society over females, but of course upon a moment's reflection it's clear that someone doing a search would be far more likely to "search" for find "female mathematicians" than "male mathematicans" (which is, at least subconsciously, for a lot of Americans, almost a redundancy!).

At any rate, many are working hard today, to alter this gender-bias and specifically encourage females to pursue mathematics, at least as an interest, if not even a vocation. One organization active in that endeavor is the Association For Women In Mathematics:

http://www.awm-math.org/

Check 'em out, especially if you're interested in math, and you're a possessor of two 'X' chromosomes!

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