Lede 2023


How social context makes a difference for women in maths

By: Sara Cely | June 25, 2023; edited July 19, 2026

We know women are underrepresented in STEM. But how underrepresented, exactly? Here's a closer look at the gender distribution in the Mathematics Department at the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.

Founded in 1949, the department is one of the oldest at Los Andes, and its Science Faculty has ranked among the best in Latin America for natural sciences for four years running. The university's own strategic plan (2021-2025), names gender equity as one of its core commitments. As an undergraduate and master's alumna, I've seen that effort in action... except, consistently, in the Mathematics Department.

The students

In the second semester of 2022, Los Andes had more than 18,000 students across all levels. Just 146 of them were in the Mathematics Department. That's 0.8% of the university.

Click here to see the students' data.

Of the department's three programs, 22 students are women, 95% of them at the undergraduate level. The number drops sharply at every level after that. What happens to women after they major in maths? Some, like me, pivot to other fields entirely (I went on to a Master's in Journalism and another in Editorial Translation). But the pattern suggests something more structural than individual choice.

I once produced a podcast episode with Jennifer Morton, a philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania who writes about grit and pessimism traps. One line from that conversation has stayed with me:

Say you're a woman interested in mathematics, pursuing graduate school. You look around you and see very few women on this path, and little support for them. It might be reasonable to set yourself some other goal that is less ambitious but perhaps more feasible. The problem with this is that if you pursue a less ambitious path, there will be fewer women in mathematics. And the next woman will face a similar situation, and so on.

The faculty

That same pattern holds at the faculty level. Across Los Andes, there are 1.7 men for every woman on the faculty; in the Science Faculty specifically, only 29% of professors are women.

Click here to see the faculty members' data.

Within the maths department, representation actually climbs through the middle ranks. At a lecturer level, 22% are women. This percentage rises to 31% of senior lecturers, and then 33% of assistant professors, before dropping sharply at associate professor, the highest and most powerful rank, to just 12%. It's not a steady decline so much as a ceiling: women make it partway up, then stall right before the rank that carries the most weight, the most workload, and the most say over the department's direction.


The authors

Nikoleta E. Glynatsi, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Max Planck Institute, analysed 19,000 maths papers to determine the authors' gender: five men for every woman. I ran a smaller version of the same exercise on the syllabi of every elective taught in the department since 2017. Of 399 uniquely identified authors, the ratio was almost 19 men per woman.

There was one glimmer of something better: exactly one female professor referenced a female author in her syllabus. That author was herself.


Click here to see the dataset.

Whether the cause is representation, expectation, or the social context that compounds both, something is slowly shifting, and mostly by force of individual will rather than institutional design. I'm curious to see where it takes us. By "us," I mean women.