Celebration of Women in Mathematics!

It was our great pleasure to host a DiSTEM event on 11th May 2022 celebrating (one day earlier!) the Women in Mathematics day. We invited talks from three speakers: Marina Logares, Nneka Umeorah and Emily Williams. The talks focused on human rights and the speakers’ own experiences as female mathematicians.

About the talks

Marina Logares (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain)

In the past years, many institutions and companies have developed an increasing interest on promoting diversity in their work environment. Moreover, there are new laws against discrimination such as the Equality Act in 2010 in UK.

Women have been the focus for many of these policies, and despite these efforts there are persistent problems such as gender gap or sexual harassment still happening, also in scientific environments. Moreover, in several cases women are subject to a double, triple etc discrimination when it is coupled with ethnicity, age, sexual orientation etc. In this talk, Marina presented specific problems that concerned LBT women in science.

Nneka Umeorah (Cardiff University)

Nneka discussed her experience and observation as a woman in maths both in Nigeria and South Africa, the two countries where she spent most of her life as a student and a staff member.

Emily Williams (Cardiff University)

In a society built for the non-disabled and neurotypical, there are significant challenges faced daily by the disabled community. In this talk, Emily discussed attitudes and barriers often encountered by people with disabilities, with a focus on energy-limiting chronic illness. Sharing her own personal experience of navigating academia (and Mathematics) with ME/CFS, she provided insight and raised awareness of the many obstacles faced by those with invisible illnesses and discussed suggestions of how these obstacles may be reduced or overcome.

Video Recording

The video recording from this event is below.