Virtual Round Table: Reimagining Mathematics through Feminist Perspectives

The Numbers and Narratives symposium unfolded as a vibrant and polyphonic dialogue on what it means to count and be counted in mathematics. At the centre was a collective effort not just to recover women mathematicians from historical invisibility, but to reconfigure the very conditions under which mathematical knowledge, participation, and recognition are made possible.

A recurring theme was the ambivalence of exceptionality. While there was broad consensus that exceptional women must be celebrated to challenge persistent myths of male mathematical genius, the group wrestled with how such celebration often functions paradoxically—making women so exceptional they become unrelatable, thus reproducing barriers for the next generation. A key intervention here was the call to centre structural inequality while still making room for narratives of achievement—without allowing either to eclipse the other.

Participants emphasized that 'who counts' in mathematics is not merely a question of headcounts or demographics, but of deeper epistemic, political, and affective dynamics. The notion of mathematical thinking itself was interrogated: how it is shaped by gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions, how it is policed through disciplinary boundaries, and how feminist and anti-colonial critiques might open it up to new, more relational and embodied possibilities.

There was widespread critique of representation-based models of equity, especially those relying on data-driven enumeration. These, it was argued, often reduce complex histories of exclusion to managerial metrics, transforming structural injustices into problems of individual deficiency: the woman who lacks confidence, the student who needs to build a better CV. It was asked: what if the very tools used to measure equity—metrics, rankings, 'best and brightest' discourses—are themselves part of the exclusionary apparatus?

The round table pushed against such deficit models and instead advocated for feminist praxis that foregrounds collaboration, solidarity, and collective knowledge-making. There was strong support for understanding mentoring and support networks not as individualised tools of success but as forms of co-resistance to hyper-competitive academic environments. In this, women’s relational agency—manifest in friendships, teaching, letter writing, or collaborative activism—was upheld as vital to reworlding mathematical cultures.

Discussion also drew attention to intersectionality, but with a critique of how it is often flattened into identity categories rather than used to interrogate systemic entanglements of power. The marginalisation of Muslim women scientists in Thrace, for example, demonstrated the need to consider geography, religion, and ethnicity alongside gender. This point expanded the symposium’s geographical and conceptual scope, urging a move beyond universalised Western feminist frames.

A crucial insight that emerged was the importance of genre and form in shaping visibility: how life-writing, Wikipedia entries, autobiographies, and diaries construct—and constrain—the ways women mathematicians are remembered. Some participants questioned whether traditional biographical forms, especially those that valorise lone genius, need to be disrupted in order to make space for alternative, less individualised modes of narrative.

There was also a strong critique of excellence discourses in higher education, which reproduce masculinised and racialised ideals of capability and leadership, often rewarding conformity to institutional norms rather than transformative potential. Equity initiatives were seen as at risk of becoming managerial rather than emancipatory when they fail to account for embodied and lived experiences of misrecognition.

One participant memorably described being a woman in STEM as 'a death by a thousand cuts'—a phrase that captured the cumulative, often invisible microaggressions and systemic exclusions that shape academic trajectories. This prompted reflection on the kinds of knowledge and experiences that do not count under current regimes of evaluation—and how they might be reclaimed.

Throughout the discussion, questions were raised about who can see themselves as a mathematician, not just who is seen as one. This subtle yet powerful shift foregrounded the affective and imaginative dimensions of mathematical subjectivity—how aspiration is cultivated, how confidence is eroded or sustained, and how collective memory shapes possibility.

Finally, the symposium reaffirmed the need to reconnect mathematics with broader political struggles—against militarism, capitalism, and ecological destruction. It was suggested that transforming mathematics must be part of a larger project of social and planetary justice, where feminist critique does not merely add women into existing structures, but rethinks what those structures are for.

In this virtual round table, then, what emerges is not a consensus, but something more generative: a multi-voiced, intellectually rigorous, and politically committed effort to reshape the narratives, epistemologies, and futures of mathematics. The question is no longer simply how to include women in mathematics, but what mathematics becomes when it is reimagined through feminist, relational, and justice-oriented lenses.