Welcome to AWM Western!

December 8, 2021

Alex Busch, Jacqueline Doan, and Sophie Wu

Welcome everyone, 

This is our first blog post on The Limit Exists Sometimes, the official blog of the Association for Women in Mathematics chapter at Western University!

We really like math! I mean, we wouldn’t be in mathematics — or have taken the effort to start this chapter — otherwise. And we also really like the idea that mathematics should be accessible. But mathematics has some peculiar traits that make conversations about inclusivity especially difficult. For starters, mathematicians often treat the culture of mathematics as if it were invisible. After all, our work is in rigorous abstractions and objective analysis. When we do mathematics, we like to think that we operate far away from the unfortunate subjectivities that plague our everyday lives. A proof can’t be sexist — it’s just right or it’s wrong.

But curiously, our “objective” field consistently fails to retain women. It’s not that women are bad at math. In fact, girls graduating high school in Canada are significantly less likely to choose to study mathematics in university than their male counterparts with worse math grades. And in spite of the fact that women compose the majority of the undergraduate student body in the Faculty of Science at Western University, men continue to outnumber women in mathematics classrooms (alongside computer science and engineering). Clearly, broad conversations about women in STEM are necessary (and we hope to facilitate some of these conversations on our blog), but they are not enough on their own to tackle the particular problems that women face in mathematics. Maybe a proof can’t be sexist — but proofs are written by mathematicians, and mathematicians are produced and shaped by their surrounding environments, and those environments certainly can be affected by sexist systems. If our community wants to become more inclusive, we need to start with a better awareness of how the accessibility of mathematics can be impacted by societal structures outside of the practice of mathematics itself.