Gender Gap in Mathematics, Gender Gap in Africa

This website is devoted to the visualization of the Gender Gap Survey results globally in Mathematics, including Applied Mathematics, and in All Sciences in Africa. The Gender Gap Survey is a global survey of scientists from all continents,  launched to assess and understand the gender gap in Science  in the framework of a project funded mainly by the International Science Council from 2017 to 2019. The survey was distributed in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Japanese, Russian and Spanish.  A number of 30037 persons responded globally, half women and half men, mainly from disciplines participating to the project: Math including Applied Math, Computer Science, Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Astronomy, History and Philosophy of Science. 

 In that survey, the questions were broadly organized around 9 themes: (1) Secondary degree; (2) First university degree; (3) Master and Doctoral degree; (4) Employment; (5) Grants, publications, and related topics; (6) Interruptions in studies and career; (7) Marriage, partnership and parenthood; (8) Discouragement and discrimination and (9) Sexual harassment. 

 See the lists of questions (in English) bellow. Note that the survey addresses several aspects that  are not measured on bibliographic metadata such as work-life balance, family support,  access to resources and sexual harassment. The results of that survey were analyzed in the book ‘A Global Approach to the Gender Gap in Mathematical, Computing, and Natural Sciences: 

How to measure it, How to Reduce it?’, but that analysis was global and did not go into details concerning particular disciplines or world regions.  In this website, we want to share the results of that survey concerning Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and the African continent, to analyze in detail the gender gap  in science among scientists who are working in Mathematics and Applied Mathematics but also to compare results from Africa and the World, in particular to see how economic and cultural differences can affect the gender gap among scientists. The study was funded by the International Mathematical Union and the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. The project participants are Sophie Dabo, Maria J. Esteban, Colette Guillopé, Marie Françoise Ouedraogo and Marie-Françoise Roy. This study benefited from the work of Cecilia J. Rivera Martinez, a 2021 internship student in the Statistics and Data Science master’s programme at CNAM (France) and undergraduate students Djidé-Mbenard Dabo and Baptiste Duthoit, who took charge of part of the data visualization programming.

This website has two different sections, one dedicated to All Sciences/Math/Applied Math and the other to the World/Africa. Each of these two sections has a similar structure:  an introductory page followed by several chapters:  (1) Studies; (2) Work; (3) Balance work/family-life; (4) Difficulties. In the various chapters, the selection of questions from the questionnaire presented for Math/Applied Math and for Africa are very similar; each question is followed by the visualization of the answers and a brief commentary.

The following pages give the data-visualisation in:

Finally, here are the two articles describing the results.

  • Sophie Dabo-Niang, Maria J. Esteban, Colette Guillopé, and Marie-Françoise Roy. Aspects of the gender gap in Mathematics. EMS Magazine No. 131 (2024), pp. 22-31. hal-04278806
  • Sophie Dabo-Niang, Maria J Esteban, Colette Guillopé, and Marie-Françoise Roy. An analysis of the gender gap among African scientists. To appear in the Proceedings of the (WM)² 2022 Congress. hal-04278870