Fables: The Tortoise? The Hare? The Mathematically Underachieving Male?

Abstract

This article reports on some results from an interview-based study with 70 practising research mathematicians, 35 women and 35 men, at universities in England, Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland. The aim of the study was to explore epistemologies of these mathematicians and any impact of them on how they conducted their professional lives. In this article, three conjectures are examined. The first was that career experiences would differ between females and males, as they indeed did. The second was that women would be differently distributed to men within the disciplinary areas, which was not the case. The third was that gender would have no effect on how these mathematicians understood and practised their discipline, which was the case. In the concluding section of the article, the findings are related to the learning of mathematics, particularly in schools, where the expressed heterogeneity of these mathematicians is replaced with an insistent drive towards homogeneity, and that homogeneity reflects a discipline which has been dominated by male styles, choices and expectations.