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This is a guest post by Meena Boppana, a junior at Harvard and former president of the Harvard Undergraduate Math Association (HUMA). Meena is passionate about addressing the gender gap in math and has co-lead initiatives including the Harvard math survey and the founding of the Harvard student group Gender Inclusivity in Math (GIIM).

I arrived at Harvard in 2012 head-over-heels in love with math. Encouraged to think mathematically since I was four years old by my feminist mathematician dad, I had even given a TEDx talk in high school declaring my love for the subject. I was certainly qualified and excited enough to be a math major.

Which is why, three years later, I think about how it is that virtually all my female friends with insanely strong math backgrounds (e.g. math competition stars) decided not to major in math (I chose computer science). This year, there were no female students in Math 55a, the most intense freshman math class, and only two female students graduating with a primary concentration in math. There are also a total of zero tenured women faculty in Harvard math.

So, I decided to do some statistical sleuthing and co-directed a survey of Harvard undergraduates in math. I was inspired by the work of Nancy Hopkins and other pioneering female scientists at MIT, who quantified gender inequities at the Institute – even measuring the square footage of their offices – and sparked real change. We got a 1/3 response rate among all math concentrators at Harvard, with 150 people in total (including related STEM concentrations) filling it out.

The main finding of our survey analysis is that the dearth of women in Harvard math is far more than a “pipeline issue” stemming from high school. So, the tale that women are coming in to Harvard knowing less math and consequently not majoring in math is missing much of the picture. Women are dropping out of math during their years at Harvard, with female math majors writing theses and continuing on to graduate school at far lower rates than their male math major counterparts.

And it’s a cultural issue. Our survey indicated that many women would like to be involved in the math department and aren’t, most women feel uncomfortable as a result of the gender gap, and women feel uncomfortable in math department common spaces.

Source: Harvard Math Survey

The simple act of talking about the gender gap has opened the floodgates to great conversations. I had always assumed that because no one was talking about the gender gap, no one cared. But after organizing a panel on gender in the math department which drew 150 people with a roughly equal gender split and students and faculty alike, I realized that my classmates of all genders feel more disempowered than apathetic.

The situation is bad, but certainly not hopeless. Together with a male freshman math major, I am founding a Harvard student group called Gender Inclusivity in Math (GIIM). The club has the two-fold goal of increasing community among women in math, including dinners, retreats, and a women speaker series, and also addressing the gender gap in the math department, continuing the trend of surveys and gender in math discussions. The inclusion of male allies is central to our club mission, and the support from male allies at the student and faculty level that we have received makes me optimistic about the will for change.

Ultimately, it is my continued love for math which has driven me to take action. Mathematics is too beautiful and important to lose 50 percent (or much more when considering racial and class-based inequities) of the potential population of math lovers.