"What can you do?" booklet

The aim of this booklet is to provide practical guidance for those wishing to do more in their department to support gender diversity. It is not an exhaustive list, and we hope that this is a starting point for most to actively continue their learning about what they can do.

Introduction

This booklet is a collaboration between our group and the Piscopia Initiative. The advice has come from Rosie Evans's experience as co-lead of Piscopia; the How to Train Your Allies group's collective involvement in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion committees; several academics; and the Piscopia community across the UK. The aim is that this booklet be made available online and to seek funding to print physical copies for distribution. If you would like to print physical copies, please get in touch with us so that we can keep track of the impact this booklet has had! Similarly, if you find this booklet helpful or have recommendations for future versions, please email us:

howtotrainyourallies@gmail.com and piscopiainitiative@gmail.com

Please appreciate that both initiatives that worked to create this booklet are made up of volunteers and so our response may be slow.

Licensing

The material found on this page is distributed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). 

This license CC BY-SA 4.0 requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, even for commercial purposes. If others remix, adapt, or build upon the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.

BY: credit must be given to the creator.

SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.

The Booklet

Find below a downloadable PDF of the booklet, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. A HTML version of the booklet is now available here.

Resources

In the making of this booklet, we came across many resources that we wanted to recommend. Here, we give brief details of various resources, reading material, networks and much more.

• Further Reading

If you are based at a university, you may be able to request that your library purchase a copy of these books. 

• 1. “x+y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender” by Eugenia Cheng

  2. “Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men” by Caroline Criado Perez. There is also a podcast called “Visible Women with Caroline Criado Perez” which talks about ways to close the gender data gap.

  3. “The No Club: Putting a Stop to Women's Dead-End Work” by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund and Laurie Weingart.

• Useful Resources

  1. The Queen Mary University of London project on Diversifying the Maths Curriculum. EDI Resources available here: https://www.seresearch.qmul.ac.uk/pce/ediresources/ including a booklet of biographies to give visibility to engineers and scientists from under-represented groups.

  2. Bibliography curated by a member of the History for Diversity in Mathematics network: [2402.15612] A source list to support DEI/EDI work in mathematical sciences

  3. UCL Press have an open access book on Women in the History of Science: A Sourcebook, with two entries that are explicitly mathematical: Women in the History of Science | UCL Press

  4. Francis Su’s lecture Mathematics for Human Flourishing (which was the basis of his subsequent book): Mathematics for Human Flourishing - Francis Su, Ph.D.

  5. Disclosure and Barring Service Sensitive Team (0300 131 2784) – transgender applicants can talk to the team before submitting an application to choose not to have any gender or name information disclosed on their DBS certificate or to their employer, that could reveal their previous gender identity.

  6. Some helpful tools for LaTeX to HTML converting include pandoc, LatexML and BookML. Information on BookML installation and usage is here: https://vlmantova.github.io/bookml/ and a how to video: https://talmo.uk/2025/accessible-mathematics.html

• Funding

  1. Variety of grants listed at https://www.lms.ac.uk/about/committees/early-career-research-committee 

     • Undergraduate Research Bursary - funds an undergraduate to spend time over the summer working with an academic

     • Postgraduate Conference Scheme - funds postgraduates to organise conferences for postgraduates

     • Early Career Fellowships – funds 6 months post-PhD

     • Travel funding also available for various levels

  2. LMS Committee for Women and Diversity in Mathematics - Grants to Support Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

     • Inclusion and Diversity fund to support events that promote EDI

     • Caring Supplementary Grants (maximum £200)

     • Grace Chisholm Young Fellowships (1 year, maximum award £2000)

     • Emmy Noether Fellowships (1 year, awards between £2000 and £10000)

  3. The Royal Society’s Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship (for those with caring responsibilities and/or health-related conditions, 8 year fellowship worth up to £1.87 million) 

• Events & Networks

  1. The Piscopia Initiative is a nationwide network encouraging women and underrepresented genders to pursue a PhD in Mathematics and offering support for students and researchers in mathematics and related disciplines. Find out more about what we do at http://www.piscopia.co.uk.

  2. PhDYourWay - Find out about PhD opportunities in a diverse maths community!

  3. The QED Network – A community-led effort by mathematical staff and PGRs to connect and support LGBTQIA+ members of the UK mathematics community.

  4. The History for Diversity in Mathematics Network - Aims to build a network around using history of mathematics to promote equality, diversity and inclusion in the mathematics curriculum in UK HE.

  5. Femafricmaths project - a network of female African mathematicians transforming Africa with mathematics.

  6. WISE Network – Organisation aiming to improve the workplace for women in STEM. They host annual awards for those contributing to equity in STEM. 

• Conference Organisation

  1. The LMS has a page on “Advice on Creating a Positive Environment at Events” which covers broader accessibility themes specifically for events: https://www.lms.ac.uk/policy/advice-on-creating-a-positive-environment-at-events.

  2. Talking maths in public also has a code of conduct for events: https://talkingmathsinpublic.uk/downloads/CodeofConduct.pdf

  3. Newcastle university has an event accessibility checklist: https://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/christian.perfect/accessibility-checklist-for-events/checklist.html 

Do you know something else that should be on this list? Please get in touch with us at howtotrainyourallies@gmail.com!