Until the late 1950s, women played only a marginal role in most highly skilled occupations, and this was taken for granted even in the immediate postwar years, when Simone de Beauvoir’s book Le Deuxième Sexe (Gallimard, 1949) was a groundbreaking work.
Since then, things have changed and, although inequality remains, the situation has improved dramatically. Yet mathematics still seems to be a stumbling block. Whether in university appointments or in elite educational programs (such as the classes préparatoires or the prestigious science-focused grandes écoles), the imbalance remains stark. Why?
The evidence
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**Charlotte Chan’s research at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor lies at the intersection of number theory, algebraic geometry and representation theory.
