Gender Gaps in the Mathematical Sciences: The Creativity Factor

The underrepresentation of women in the mathematically-intensive sciences (hereafter, for brevity, referred to as the hard sciences) has been a concern in the United States for over half a century. After the women’s movement began in the 1960s, gender gaps in many professional fields decreased, and some even reversed dramatically. Currently women comprise about half the M.D’s, two-thirds of psychology Ph.D’s, and three-quarters of veterinary medicine doctorates, more than seven times as high as in the 60s [CW3, p. 5]. In the hard sciences, however, the large gender gap favoring men has stubbornly persisted (see Figure 1), and many efforts have been made to determine why.