Building Community: One AWM Chapter’s Tale of Programmatic Outreach

Abstract

Since its founding in 2013, the Kutztown University Association for Women in Mathematics student chapter has built a supportive community of women students and faculty on campus and beyond. This article aims to share our successful experiences with the broader community by presenting our pre- and mid-pandemic AWM activities including Mathematics Day for Girls, Women's Empowerment Day, Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs, and our Kutztown University AWM Virtual Lecture Series. Feedback from past and current participants of our AWM student chapter is also included.

KEYWORDS:

• Association for Women in Mathematics
• student engagement
• extracurricular events
• collaboration
• women in mathematics
• community outreach

1. INTRODUCTION

Recruiting and retaining college-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students remains a priority in higher education. In 2007, the U.S. Congress passed the America Competes Act to invest in STEM research and education for students from kindergarten to graduate school. Congress reauthorized the act 3 years later with the America Competes Reauthorization Act (2010), with additional stipulations to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in STEM fields [6]. Despite these efforts, as students progress to higher levels of education, they become less interested in STEM-related areas [8]. A study carried out by the U.S. Department of Education indicated that over half of the students who declare an STEM major during their freshman year switch to a non-STEM Major before graduating [3]. The STEM retention gap is particularly noticeable when considering the number of women and transgender and non-binary individuals, as compared to the number of cis-gender men, who enter and stay in an STEM field. As such, there have been many efforts to draw more women into STEM fields and retain them. While there are more women in STEM than there used to be, they are still far less likely than men to major in such fields, especially engineering and computer science, and women are also more likely to leave STEM fields than are men early in their undergraduate studies [5]. Women hold less than 25% of STEM jobs, which has been the case throughout the past decade, even as college-educated women have increased their share of the overall workforce from 46% to 49% [1]. Continued efforts are necessary to recruit and retain more women in STEM.

Figure 1. Percentage of women in mathematics, STEM, and overall percentage at our university.

Figure 2. Math major enrollments at our university.

Our university has faced similar challenges in the recruitment and retention of women mathematics majors in past years. For context, Kutztown University (KU) is a four-year public university with about 8000 undergraduate and graduate students, and most of our students are from local and surrounding areas. Currently, we have about 1200 STEM majors and about 30 mathematics majors. During the last two decades, the average percentage of undergraduate women students at KU was about 58.91%, while the average percentages of women STEM majors and women mathematics majors were 39.40% and 40.00%, respectively (see Figure 1). While the percentage of STEM women majors and total women students remained steady, there was a trend of decrease in the percentage of women mathematics majors from 2000 (51.14%) to 2013 (29.31%), as shown in Figure 2. This decline in women mathematics majors was our major motivation for forming our AWM chapter. In the rest of this paper, we will describe our early chapter events and trace the growth of the chapter to include campus, local, and global community outreach. We include reflections and strategies for other AWM chapters as well as documentation from students on the impact of our chapter on their experience in our mathematical community.

2. CHAPTER BEGINNINGS

We founded our AWM chapter in 2013, focusing on combating the decrease in women's mathematics majors and building a community of like-minded students and faculty who were interested in supporting women and girls as they pursued studies in mathematics. During this time, we had monthly meetings with topics such as the life of women mathematicians, the appearance of mathematics in art, the mathematics of origami, magic squares, what life is like as a woman graduate student, and fun mathematical games. We relied on the expertise of women in our department and the ideas of our student membership to facilitate these meetings. We were grateful to our department for providing the funding for the pizza incentive at our meetings, which always helped with attendance and ultimately helped the chapter to grow, given that our meetings are held at 11 am when students would often be eating lunch. While we were proud of these early efforts, we wanted to do more to support women in mathematics on our campus.

2.1. Increasing Visibility

To facilitate our growth as an organization, our members became interested in expanding our activities beyond the confines of our monthly meetings. In addition to participating in KU’s Student Involvement Fair, where we set up a table with information about our chapter, we also took part in KU’s annual Merchant Trick or Treat where both students and townspeople set up tables along Main Street to allow the local children to participate in a safe night of Halloween fun. These events gave our AWM chapter exposure to both the university community at large as well as to the people of Kutztown, the town in which our university is located. To further engage with the community, we created and sold pins and ornaments decorated with mathematical puns, hosted AWM representatives at the Mathematics Department’s Accepted Students Day, and, through a competitive application based on our accomplishments, achieved Gold Status, which is the highest funding level for student organizations on campus. Overall, participating in these events and efforts paved the way for more involvement in the campus community.

2.2. Joint Meetings and Early Collaboration

One of the ways in which we sought to increase our involvement on campus was through collaboration with other departments and organizations. For example, we began hosting women faculty members from other departments, such as a professor from our Physical Sciences Department, who talked to us about women in astronomy, thereby increasing the number of women role models in STEM for our students. We hoped that providing further role models would encourage students to broaden their thinking concerning who they could become [9]. In addition, we collaborated with the Math Club to organize a campus-wide bus trip to visit the National Museum of Mathematics in New York City, which provided an important opportunity for women to be exposed to more mathematics. We also held joint meetings with the Statistics and Actuarial Science Club (SASC) and the Feminist Majority Leadership Alliance (FMLA). SASC aims to provide students interested in careers in statistics or actuarial science with support, resources, and exposure to the field. With SASC, we hosted a woman actuary with 34 years of experience at the USAA Insurance Company. She shared with both of our organizations how she cultivated her career in actuarial analysis in the insurance industry. This was valuable to the students in attendance because many of them were interested in pursuing careers in actuarial science. It was also valuable for students who were still figuring out what they wanted to do with their mathematics degrees as this talk helped them to discover another way they can use their degrees besides going into academia. The mission of FMLA is to create an awareness of issues important to students of all genders while promoting the welfare of society as a whole. Primarily an activist group, FMLA focuses on issues such as self-empowerment, gender equity, freedom of choice, domestic violence, and sexual abuse. At the joint meeting with FMLA, we shared information about women mathematicians like Katherine Johnson and Ada Lovelace and their hidden histories, while FMLA shared information about intersectionality and feminist theory. Our collaborations with these organizations, particularly FMLA, informed our thinking as we started organizing more regional, national, and international events. These efforts are described in more detail in the following sections, but first, we offer reflections on what we learned from these early activities.

2.3. Reflections on Our Early Chapter Events

In the first few years, our turnout was small, but we did not get discouraged. We focused on holding meetings consistently at a convenient time, in our case the fourth Tuesday of the month at 11 am, with hopes that consistency would demonstrate that we were planning to become a constant fixture in the student life at our university. This particular time slot is a “free hour” during which there are no classes scheduled. Given that it is a time that students often use to eat lunch, we asked the Mathematics Department if they would be willing to approve the use of departmental money to purchase pizza to encourage students to attend. It is amazing what free food can do for a gathering! Our chapter’s faculty advisors also brought homemade baked goods for the meetings as well as drinks, so that our time together, although we were in a classroom, would feel informal and welcoming. These collective efforts were successful in increasing our attendance at meetings.

To select topics for the meetings, we started with the interests of our faculty advisors, who were among our first presenters, and also the interests of other women faculty in our department who were supportive of our initiative to start this chapter. Once we had a core group of students, we asked them what they would be interested in learning. For further meeting ideas, we also referenced the AWM Newsletters (https://awm-math.org/publications/newsletter/) and publications from AWM such as Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics: Reminiscences, History, and Visions for the Future of AWM [2]. All of these resources proved useful in finding compelling activities and topics for our meetings, which helped to increase our membership as our chapter began.

Ultimately, our early chapter events were a critical foundation in the further development of our chapter and taught us valuable lessons about successful meeting activities, community engagement, and collaboration with other groups on campus that informed our larger-scale events significantly.

3. LOCAL AND CAMPUS COMMUNITY OUTREACH

Starting in 2017, we coordinated three main initiatives, including Mathematics Day for Girls, Women’s Empowerment Day, and Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs, each of which we will now discuss in more detail.

3.1. Local Community Outreach

Local community engagement became our focus in 2017. Specifically, we wanted to host an event that would encourage girls to pursue their passion for mathematics. This event became Mathematics Day for Girls (originally titled High School Mathematics Day for Girls but later shortened), which we have held annually since 2017, although it had to be canceled in 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic. This event is held in early January when the university is not in session but the local middle and high schools are. We invite between 50 and 80 middle and high school girls and their teachers who are interested in STEM fields, particularly mathematics, from all over the area, including schools in Allentown and Reading, two of the most populous and diverse cities in Pennsylvania. At the event, we host three guest speakers in various fields related to mathematics, such as engineering, medicine, and computer science, and we hold breakout sessions with each speaker as well as a panel where the girls can ask questions and build connections with women who use mathematics every day. We always conclude the event with a fun group mathematics activity, which the girls enjoy. The ultimate goal is to nurture the girls’ love of mathematics and inspire them to use their talents to pursue mathematical careers. This event has become one of our most-established traditions and a source of pride for all the members of our AWM chapter, and we feel that our work has a lasting impact on the girls who attend. We have even had former participants of this event end up as students at KU, which is compelling evidence for the success of our event in reaching the local community.

Many of our AWM students mentioned the values and benefits of our Mathematics Day for Girls, both to themselves and to the girls who participated. One of our mathematics alumnae, Brooke Eshbach, said that she

especially loved helping out at the High School Mathematics Day for Girls. I loved being able to help these girls cultivate their love of math and realize that there are tons of women who are into math. I wish that I had had the opportunity to attend an event like that when I was in high school, but unfortunately never did. I'm just glad that the girls who can come are given the opportunity to attend KU’s event.

Our former secretary, Lindsey Moyer, who is now a high school teacher, said that

the most valuable program that our club runs is the High School Mathematics Day for Girls because not only do the high schoolers learn, but the undergraduates benefit as well. As a future teacher, this event allows me to interact with students in the level that I will be teaching one day. It gives me a good idea of the different mathematical ability levels these students have and what their goals are for the future. I have been keeping note these past three years of what seems to drive these high schoolers to want to succeed in mathematics, and am very excited to implement these same ideas into my future classroom.

Our former president, Emily Danko, who is also a high school teacher, felt that

this event gave the girls exposure to more math careers that they can see themselves doing rather than the normal male dominated roles in math. That event also impacted me as a teacher because I like to encourage my students to explore career options and I was able to see even more career paths than I had seen as a student.

We feel that this feedback solidifies Mathematics Day for Girls as a valuable addition to both our chapter and the local community.

3.2. Campus Community Outreach and Collaboration

In addition to our community-building efforts with local high school and middle school girls, we have collaborated with multiple organizations on campus to plan events supporting women, especially women in male-dominated fields like mathematics. For example, in 2019, we helped to plan Women's Empowerment Day, an event co-founded by our former AWM president and run through the Pennsylvania State System of High Education’s Women's Consortium in collaboration with KU’s Women's Center and FMLA. Women's Empowerment Day, which drew an audience of about 100 students, staff, and faculty, included a fair to celebrate intersectional feminism and diversity, to which many diversity-focused campus organizations, such as the Black Student Union and the LGBTQ + Center, were invited. It also included a workshop on mental health and self-love and a panel of women faculty members, who discussed their experiences navigating academia as a woman. For our part, we hosted a booth in the diversity fair with a graphing activity in which attendees could participate, and one of our faculty advisors and co-authors on this paper, Lyn McQuaid, served on the faculty panel, with many AWM members in attendance. We were very pleased to be able to contribute to an event that was focused on intersectionality as we sought to support more diverse identities in our organization and department. Specifically, at the diversity fair, we were glad to be able to appeal to university members from many different racial, ethnic, sexual, gender, and ability groups and learn more about best practices for supporting all the overlapping identities of our members, thereby embracing the true spirit of intersectionality [4].

After participating in Women’s Empowerment Day, we sought to run additional collaborative events with FMLA and the Women’s Center. As such, in March 2020, we coordinated another event together called Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs, which focused on advocating for women in male-dominated fields. Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs, a campus-wide, 3-hour symposium which hosted a total of 80 attendees, focused on helping women, particularly undergraduate students, navigate male-dominated fields like mathematics. Specifically, our goal was to provide advice and strategies to help women to move beyond traditional, “pink-collar” career roles and increase recruitment and retention of women in traditionally male-dominated positions. To this end, the event featured a keynote speech from a software engineer/business owner on how women can best stand out in STEM fields. In addition, we hosted a panel of women in male-dominated, academic and industrial positions including mathematics, cyber security, finance, and industrial engineering. Because we would be remiss to discuss gender equity in careers without addressing strategies for combating the gender wage gap, we also hosted a salary negotiation workshop during the event [7]. We were pleased at the end of the event when Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs had served its purpose: connecting women with resources and advice from women in the same male-dominated fields that they wish to pursue.

Overall, Mathematics Day for Girls, Women’s Empowerment Day, and Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs were successful in encouraging girls and women to participate in mathematics and other STEM fields while empowering them with the skills and knowledge to succeed in them.

3.3. Reflections on Our Local and Campus Outreach Events

In running our outreach events, we developed strategies targeting four main areas: attendance, representation, funding, and labor.

To boost attendance, we used several tactics. Initially, we used paper flyers hung around the mathematics building to advertise our events, but we quickly learned that email communication and digital flyers were more practical. At first, we sent emails to all mathematics and mathematics education majors and minors, as well as to the mathematics faculty. However, we found that expanding our email lists to include those in the Biology, Physical Sciences, and Computer Science Departments is a useful strategy because some of the events we hold may attract students from these departments in addition to students from the Mathematics Department, and women in these fields often have similar experiences to women in mathematics. Overall, we have found that the most effective email scheme consists of multiple reminders and incentives. For example, advertising a chapter meeting once the week before the meeting and again the day before the meeting has proven to be useful in attracting a greater number of attendees. Furthermore, as mentioned before, serving pizza and baked goods at our meetings has helped us to grow our membership and attendance. We also invite students from KU’s Honors Program to our events because honors students are required to attend academic events, and our chapter events help them to meet the requirement. In addition, some professors have agreed to offer extra credit to students who attend our events, providing further motivation for attendance, and this past year, we presented our inaugural set of AWM Service Awards, which students won if they attended our events or performed service for our organization. The awards are tiered using the following system: 5 service~hours:~Bronze Service Award, 10 service hours: Silver Service Award, 15 service hours: Gold Service Award, 20 service hours: Platinum Service Award, 25+ service hours: Diamond Service Award.

For our Mathematics Day for Girls, to which we were inviting high school and middle school girls, we communicated with the schools by sending an invitation email to their mathematics department chairs as well as any teachers listed on their web pages who appeared to identify as women (schools often have the titles Mrs., Ms., Miss, or Mr. in their faculty listings). This plan was only moderately successful the first year in that we only had five schools out of 10 respond. When discussing the low response rate with the teachers who attended, they shared that teachers receive many emails, which often get deleted rather than read, and suggested that instead of emailing teachers, we should send the invitation emails to the school guidance counselors. The counselors are aware of teachers who would be interested in such an event and can forward the information to these teachers, which would make it less likely to be deleted. Furthermore, if a counselor knows that there is a non-woman teacher who is an advocate for women in STEM, they could forward the invitation to that teacher rather than restricting our invitation to only women teachers. In general, these strategies for boosting attendance proved viable, increasing the number of students who attended our events both outside and within our department and increasing the number of local girls who could participate in Mathematics Day for Girls every year.

Through our collaborations with FMLA and the Women’s Center, we also learned about the importance of representation of diverse identities in our events. As such, in planning Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs, we made active efforts to select speakers that reflected student participants’ diverse identities to them, thereby allowing students to see themselves represented in cis-white-male-dominated fields, an important goal for establishing an inclusive program, increasing access, and building audience numbers [9]. For this event, we primarily focused on including women of diverse racial and ethnic identities. At the time, we were unaware of how we might identify other identities of potential speakers, and so we sought to select speakers based on the identities we could observe. We now realize that an increasing number of professionals are including additional identities on their professional webpages, whether by including their preferred pronouns or directly addressing their identities. As we move forward with current and future events, we seek to be as inclusive as possible when selecting speakers by continuing to invite speakers of diverse racial and ethnic identities as well as inviting speakers in underrepresented groups due to gender, sexuality, age, ability, citizenship, and other factors.

A third area in which we focused our efforts in planning our outreach events was funding. None of our events would have been successful without our collaborators and funding sources. To fund our Mathematics Day for Girls, we received money from an external grant the first year and, after the event proved to be a success, we were able to obtain funding from both the Dean of our college as well as from the Mathematics Department. Our department was given budget money for recruitment events, and our event falls under this designation; in fact, we have recruited two students who participated in our events thus far to decide to attend KU. For Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs, we had support from not only FMLA and the Women’s Center but also several other partner organizations within our university, which included the Activities Board, the Career Development Center, the Commission on the Status of Women, the Mathematics Department, the State Employees Credit Union, Women Achieving the Vision of Excellence, the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and the Women in STEM Club. While events for women in STEM are often difficult to fund, we raised over $1280 in funding for food, flyers, and attendee and speaker giveaways by making funding requests and agreements with our collaborators. For example, we attended KU’s Activities Board meeting to make a sizeable funding request of $600, targeting them specifically because they disburse the most funding to other student organizations. In addition, it was extremely helpful that all 10 of our speakers were willing to speak on a volunteer basis. Rather than requesting payment, they were honored to be invited to speak and share their experiences. While a limited amount of funding is available to us upon request from the Mathematics Department or organizations like the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, we maintain this practice of seeking volunteers to speak at our events because we find that many speakers are delighted to participate for free. However, this practice of free labor is not sustainable in the long run, and creating a funding source to pay women for their services would be ideal. With limited funds like many organizations for women in STEM, we have found that our partner organizations and campus resources like grant money have proven the most valuable, and we encourage other chapters to consider collaborating with other groups to increase their funding pool.

Similar to funding shortages, many organizations for women in STEM suffer from labor shortages, and our chapter was no exception. This made the support of our partner organizations even more valuable. For example, for Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs, each of our partner organizations contributed in different, valuable ways by creating attendee giveaways (Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs pins, since pins are popular among college-age students), recommending spa gift baskets from a local, women-owned business as speaker giveaways (to foster continued relationships with our speakers), preparing and distributing flyers and programs, and staging the auditorium where the event was hosted. Perhaps most importantly, our partnerships were crucial in identifying speakers for the event, who included faculty and staff involved with the participating organizations as well as their connections in the local community. For example, the chair of the Computer Science Department and advisor to the Women in STEM Club helped us in securing two of the speakers on our panel, and the director of the Women’s Center helped us find our keynote speaker and one of our panelists. Lacking many of these connections within our organization, the connections from our collaborators proved invaluable. Without all of our collaborators and supporters, Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs would have never been the event that it eventually grew to be, and we would not have had nearly the impact on our university and local community that we ultimately had.

Collectively, Mathematics Day for Girls, Women’s Empowerment Day, and Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs helped us to engage with the local and campus community in a way in which we previously had not, and this served as a stepping stone for our engagement with the global community, which is discussed in the following section.

4. GLOBAL COMMUNITY OUTREACH

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, our AWM events, like so many others, were severely affected since we could no longer hold in-person events for an indefinite period. In response, we began our most recent and successful project – the Kutztown University Association for Women in Mathematics Virtual Lecture Series – which has allowed us to reach national recognition and international audiences.

We began the KU AWM Virtual Lecture Series in September 2020, when Yun (Amy) Lu, one of our faculty advisors and a co-author of this paper, gave the inaugural lecture. Since then, we have hosted a total of 19 different speakers from multiple universities and industrial positions in diverse areas including abstract algebra, number theory, financial mathematics, mathematical biology, and more. Because of its virtual format, the series has become more successful than we ever imagined it would be, with each lecture consistently having an average of 30 attendees located everywhere from Alaska to California to Pennsylvania and even outside American borders with participants from Asia, Europe, and South America. In addition to its wide-reaching impact, the lecture series has fostered collaboration within the global mathematics community. Throughout the series, several students and faculty members from KU and other universities reached out to us to thank us for organizing the series because they found research collaborators, mentors, and resources for their classes by attending our talks. For example, a professor at the University of Alaska Southeast emailed us after a talk on polytopes and Whitney-stratified spaces and told us that he invited his geometry students to join the lecture because it related directly to topics that they had just covered in class. Furthermore, a professor in our department made two connections with researchers in number theory that could lead to future collaborations, and two of our students identified prospective research mentors for graduate school through the lecture series. We are proud that our series has helped people identify research mentors and collaborators, and we were equally delighted to receive positive feedback on the lecture series from multiple student participants, who found that the series added value to their careers and expanded their mathematical horizons. One of our mathematics majors, Charlotte Saternos, commented that

It's encouraging to see women from a broad variety of careers in math talk about their work. I’ve enjoyed hearing speakers give a unique insight into their fields of research and jobs.

We are pleased that our series has facilitated such enriching connections.

The lecture series also marked the first event that encouraged participation from individuals of different gender identities, an important goal of ours, as we aim to establish a culture in our department where all people, regardless of their identity, support women and underrepresented groups in mathematics. Since we strive to maintain this welcoming and supportive culture, we are hopeful that our series reached people with non-binary gender identities, but unfortunately, we have no way to confirm this. However, within our department, we noticed that the series greatly increased the number of men participating in our events, and when we asked them for feedback, they confirmed the value of the lecture series to them. For instance, one mathematics alumnus, Isaac Reiter, who is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in mathematics, noted that he especially appreciated the lecture series during the isolating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and stated its impact on his mathematics research and education:

[The lecture series] gave us [the Mathematics Department] the opportunity to talk about our mutual love for math, meet new students, and remind us of all the lunch periods we spent attending each other’s lectures … the incredible variety of the AWM lecture series provided me with a crash course in potential research topics … it featured female mathematicians from all walks and stages of life [and] this incredible pool of perspectives helped me to imagine how I will spend my career. I was able to network with people at a time in my life where I doubted if that would be possible.

Similarly, another mathematics major, Paul Barton, found that

while some of the topics were a bit over my head, each lecture still had something to offer, as an opportunity to learn about the existence of an area of research or a specific problem … I could only follow for part of [some of] these lectures but this motivated me to read up on the subjects. I think there may be a tangible benefit in being exposed to something outside of one’s ‘mathematical comfort zone.

In addition to reaching more people with diverse identities, the lecture series also helped us to reach people outside of mathematics and helped them to see applications of mathematics to their fields. For example, one of our former officers, Jessica Licker, was an English major, and she noted how the lecture series has applications to her career interests outside of conventional mathematics:

I've been researching ways to integrate mathematics into my future humanities careers, and having lecturers come from a variety of fields from industry to education broadened my view of how I could achieve my goals of promoting interdisciplinary studies to my future library patrons.

In short, our enthusiasm for the lecture series and its success as a program mirrors the enthusiasm and participation of the students, and we could not be happier about this. It is certainly a good sign as we seek to continue the lecture series in the future.

4.1. Reflections on Our Global Outreach Events

As with our past outreach events, we learned a lot from coordinating the lecture series. In particular, the series’ success has been largely a result of our dynamic advertising schemes. While we continued to advertise to our usual group of mathematics, mathematics education, biology, physical sciences, and computer science students, we also tailored advertising to the lecture topic. For instance, we invited the business students to the talks on financial mathematics and the anthropology and sociology students to the talks on social mathematics. Outside of the university, we advertised through the national AWM social media accounts, through our regional Eastern Pennsylvania and Delaware (EPaDel) Mathematical Association of America (MAA) chapter’s social media and news pages, and through regional and national announcements on MAA Connect, which has proven to be our most useful advertising platform. Furthermore, we took advantage of traditional means of Internet advertising by maintaining our AWM chapter’s webpage, Instagram page, YouTube channel, and Engage page (a student organization webpage through KU’s Office of Student Involvement). To expand our audience further, all of our web advertising is designed to be accessible to comply with the standards of equity that we follow as a chapter. For example, we include contact information for our Disability Services Office on all of our flyers for attendees who require accommodations, and we have verified that our flyers are compatible with screen reader technology, making them accessible to blind and visually impaired individuals. In addition, our webpage includes select video recordings of the talks that have been featured in our series thus far (with automated closed captioning), providing wider outreach possibilities for those who cannot attend. At the same time, we selected 5:00 pm Eastern Standard Time for our lectures to make the time zone more accessible to American participants on the West Coast, since our audience was primarily American. We believe that these advertising standards and scheduling considerations have been some of the most important factors in the series’ success.

As with past events, one of the biggest barriers to the lecture series’ success has been cultivating our network of speakers. To do so thus far, we invited speakers based on personal connections, research interests, and professional connections, with the unifying goal of achieving a slate of talks on a diverse range of mathematical topics. We found speakers by several avenues, but the main one was by emailing prospective speakers directly and inviting them to speak. Furthermore, after Lyn McQuaid spoke on our chapter’s efforts at the 2021 Joint Mathematics Meetings, five prospective speakers reached out to us and expressed interest in taking part in the lecture series. Just as with Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs, in selecting our speakers, we aimed to represent diverse racial and ethnic identities and continue to move towards increasing representation for as many diverse identities as possible [9]. Again, just like Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs, we were lucky to have found speakers willing to speak without compensation for their services. In this way, we have been able to run the lecture series at no expense, although we hope to find funding to support women who volunteer to speak in the future.

We largely credit the success of the lecture series with the virtual platform, as we found that we had more attendance in the virtual format than we ever had in the past. Compared with in-person events and meetings, virtual meetings, which one can attend at home, while eating, or while in pajamas, have the appeal of convenience and comfort that is impossible for events people must attend in person. Furthermore, virtual meetings afforded us the luxury of inviting people from all over the country and world because there was no travel, or travel funding, required. We are proud that our lecture series has proven to have such a far reach into the global community.

5. CONCLUSION

As we prepare for our next steps as a chapter, we are encouraged by the recruitment and retention of women in the Mathematics Department. Since the founding of our AWM chapter in 2013, our chapter has grown from a group of three members to 25 members, a size on par with other student organizations on our campus, and for seven years after the chapter’s founding, the number of women mathematics majors was stable even though the total number of mathematics majors has been decreasing (see Figure 2). We hope that our chapter activities during this time were a contributing factor in recruiting and retaining women in our department to keep the percentage of women mathematics majors stable. Despite our success, the unexpected drop in women mathematics majors in 2021 indicates that our chapter still has more work to do in the future to recruit more women mathematics majors and to retain current women majors in our department.

Looking towards the end of our first decade, we reflect on the various ways in which we have built our far-reaching AWM community. Overall, we credit our success to the support of our advisors and the willingness of our members to be involved and help manage our various events as a team. For other AWM chapters hoping to grow their membership, we found that having a collaborative and active executive board was essential to the success and sustainability of our chapter. However, our work is not done yet, and in the future, we plan to continue to grow our community. For instance, we plan to continue our Virtual Lecture Series with hopes of incorporating live events that will simultaneously be streamed. We have also begun to collaborate with our Math Club, which has many more men members, to host social events for the Mathematics Department with the hope that this collaboration will help to prevent the siloing of advocacy for women in STEM and AWM membership at KU to women alone, as often can occur [10]. Finally, when the pandemic finally recedes, we plan to reestablish our annual Mathematics Day for Girls, and we are planning to include more middle school students as well. We hope that these efforts will continue to have a positive effect on women in mathematics within our community and beyond.

Overall, we have found that our efforts have been rewarding to all who have joined in our various activities. Our current chapter president, Anna Lengner, noted that it was the “community of women who understood and went through the same experiences that I go through” that attracted her to our chapter in the first place. She also emphasized the importance of supporting one another’s interests in mathematics, especially because it is such a male-dominated field. Lindsey Moyer, former AWM secretary and mathematics education major, found her honors thesis in an AWM talk on Magic Squares given by Lyn McQuaid, and, in her words, “that talk provided an opportunity for me to complete research with her for a year on aspects of Magic Squares, which helped me as an undergraduate.” She recently had two papers from her honors thesis accepted for publication and was offered her “dream teaching job” upon graduation. Similarly, former president Emily Danko found applications for what she learned in AWM in other areas of her career, noting that “the ideas [from AWM] helped me because I am a math teacher and recognizing the gap between boys and girls in the classroom has helped me change how I teach to make things more inclusive.” Another former president and co-author of this paper, Vanessa Maybruck, spent 2.5 years in the role and found “enormous value” in her participation in AWM. In addition to running events like Beyond Pink-Collar Jobs and the lecture series that gave her the opportunity for “direct involvement in advocating for women in math and other male-dominated fields,” she has built a network of connections with prominent and budding mathematicians alike through the lecture series, connections that she believes “served [her] well when she applied for Ph.D. programs in applied mathematics.” She also won a prestigious award at KU for her research and community service, both of which were fostered through her participation in AWM. Vanessa notes that she is “proud to see our little chapter of AWM blossoming and growing to reach broader communities beyond our university walls and even our state borders.” This student feedback is incredibly valuable to us because it suggests promise for the future as we continue to work towards our goals of developing a supportive community for women in our mathematics program and recruiting and retaining more women in mathematics and related fields. As we prepare to enter the next academic year, we hope our endeavors will work to preserve and expand the community we have created as a student chapter, and we hope our future generations of officers and members will lead our chapter to new and greater heights.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to thank the following students for sharing their thoughts about how our AWM chapter and its activities have positively impacted their collegiate experiences: Paul Barton, Emily Danko, Brooke Eshbach, Anna Lengner, Jessica Licker, Lindsey Moyer, Isaac Reiter, and Charlotte Saternos. Vanessa Maybruck would like to thank her amazing fellow officers and her wonderful advisors for making her experience with AWM so valuable. She also wants to thank the KU Mathematics Department and larger KU community for attending our events!

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lyn McQuaid

Lyn McQuaid is an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics at Kutztown University. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mathematics from Lehigh University. Her current research interests are women in mathematics and magic squares.

Vanessa Maybruck

Vanessa Maybruck is a Ph.D. student and NSF Graduate Research Fellow at the University of Colorado Boulder in the Department of Applied Mathematics. She is also pursuing her Ph.D. certificate in Interdisciplinary Quantitative Biology through CU's BioFrontiers Institute. She is interested in mathematical modeling and data science, particularly as they relate to biological, scientific, and social problems in the public sphere such as equity, public health, and climate change and conservation. Vanessa graduated from Kutztown University in May 2022 with dual degrees in Applied Mathematics and secondary mathematics education with a minor in Biochemistry and spent 2.5 years as president of KU's AWM chapter.

Yun Lu

Yun Lu is a professor in the Department of Mathematics at Kutztown University. She received her M.A. degree in Computer Science and Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from Wesleyan University in 2006 and 2007, respectively. Her research interests include optimization and mathematics education.