Statistics on Women in Mathematics / Catherine Hobbs & Esmyr Koomen

Data on women in mathematical research in Europe was last collected in 1993 by the Women in Mathematics Committee of the European Mathematical Society. This illustrated a perhaps surprising distribution of the proportions of women in mathematical research across the EU, with considerable differences between different regions. In particular, southern countries, such as Italy, Portugal and Spain, had a much higher proportion of women in mathematics than northern countries such as Germany and Sweden. In 2005, funding from the UK Royal Society Athena Awards enabled authors to repeat this data collection exercise. They used a variety of sources for data collection, including European Women in Mathematics regional coordinators, national statistics agencies and the internet. Their aim was to collect data to compare with the 1993 study, but they also collected further data from countries not included in the original study and tried to obtain more detailed information about career grading than had been possible in 1993.