Numbers and Narratives - Do women count? Yet?

Keynote Lecture

Do women count? Yet?

Prof. Valerie Walkerdine, Cardiff University, UK

‘Counting Girls Out’ (1986) was a book written by myself and the Girls and Mathematics Unit. In that work we discussed research undertaken with two groups of British girls, one working and the other middle class, then aged 10, who were first seen at age 4. In this phase of the research, we interviewed girls and their teachers and gave them a maths test. What I am remembering from this phase is that some of the girls, who were in private schools, laughed at the test, which they found far too easy, having it seemed, often weekly tests in their schools. Conversely, hardly anyone in the state schools had taken tests. But more than this I remembered one girl, a black working class girl, top of her class, whose score was worse than the worst score from all the middle class schools. I was both angry and so upset because I knew that this would mean that her experience of success in an academic sense at least, would be short-lived. In the 1990s, we met the sample again, now 21, and saw the huge differences in life experience and educational attainment – not one working class young woman had attended university at the age of 18, though a tiny minority got there later. Now, aged 51, we are interviewing them again. This brought me up again, even more forcefully, to the question of ‘who counts’? In this presentation, I explore this question, bearing in mind also developments in autotheory, which confront us with what it means to theorise through our own lives and experience against the ‘grand universalising metanarratives of the Cogito.

do women count.pptx

Afterthoughts

Walkerdine’s keynote cut deeply into the persistent structures of inequality that continue to shape mathematical education and access. What made it especially powerful, however, was the way she interwove empirical critique with a deeply personal mode of engagement. By drawing on autotheory—the practice of theorizing through one’s own life—she resonated strongly with this project’s commitment to rethinking how women’s contributions to mathematics are remembered, archived, and narrated. Her central question, “Who counts?”, becomes not only a matter of inclusion and access, but of epistemic visibility: who gets to be recognized as a subject of knowledge?

The Number and Narratives project similarly asks how we might recover women mathematicians from the margins—not simply as exceptional figures, but as thinkers whose ideas shaped the cultural and scientific imagination of modernity. I have turned to their letters, autobiographies, diaries, as well as literary and philosophical writings—not as anecdotal supplements to their mathematical work, but as vital and generative forms of thought in their own right.

Walkerdine’s keynote was a timely, beautiful, and moving contribution—reminding us of those who cannot be counted, those lost to the archive, and of the fact that theory is most powerful when it emerges from lived experience.