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Career paths in mathematics: a comparison between women and men

In western industrialized countries, we can still find the stereotype that Mathematics is not a subject for women. This is reflected, for instance, in the number of female university professors: in many countries (we shall be focussing on Germany), the percentage of women among the university professors is very small. In order to discover the (historical and current) causes of this phenomenon, we analyzed the career paths of several thousand individuals who successfully completed their studies of mathematics at German universities during the 20th century. This paper introduces the resources and methods of our interdisciplinary research project and presents the main results obtained by comparing career paths of male and female mathematicians. Some popular science books currently enjoying wide distribution suggest that women may be genetically predisposed to be poor at mathematics. These books—allegedly based on scientific results—serve to reinforce gender stereotypes and claim, among other things, that women have a weaker spatial sense than men due to structural differences of the brain. The argument goes that therefore women are less likely than men to choose professions that require spatial visualization skills. To see an example of this: