STEM Heroines: Math role models for girls

The number of women in science, technology, engineering, and math fields is growing, but women are still a minority overall in STEM career paths.

Getting girls into STEM fields has become a major initiative of businesses, organizations, and governments 鈥� inspiring multiple campaigns to educate parents and kids about the value of diversity in STEM fields and classroom activities.

Ruth Charney, president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), likens math to puzzle solving, opening up interest to math for kids who might only equate math to endless rules and equations.

鈥淚t鈥檚 a wonderful job. It鈥檚 a wonderful place to be for women today,鈥� says Ms. Charney from her office at Brandeis University. 鈥淚 think the way to go when talking to children is to show that math is really about puzzle solving, not just doing some rote equations.鈥�

Parents can encourage their kids鈥� interest in math through everything from local to online sites such as numberphile.com and khanacademy.org that encourage students through video tutorials. The TED ED site also offers a series of math-related videos, explaining math through engaging anecdotes featuring , predicting the weather, and .

For girls in particular, Charney suggests looking at the AWM website for information about built specifically to nurture girls鈥� interest in math.

鈥淚 think it鈥檚 good to have those kinds of resources for children so they can find the enjoyment in math and see how much scope there is to math beyond just seeing how fast you can solve an equation,鈥� Charney adds.

While there are a great many women who have paved the way in mathematics, Charney cautions, 鈥淎lso we want to be mathematicians, not 鈥榃omen in mathematics.鈥� We would like to move past that gender distinction.鈥�

While Charney leads the charge on the future of math, here are some of the earliest female math scholars.

What these women needed was a way into the education they desperately craved, often finding it through a mentor.

Today, the AWM has created a program to , both men and women, with girls and women who are interested in mathematics or are pursuing careers in mathematics.

The majority of information in the list draws from the , the magazine, and the Women Mathematicians website, which is operated by Agnes Scott College.

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STEM Heroines: Math role models for girls

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