Invisible and special: young women’s experiences as undergraduate mathematics students

Abstract

This paper reports on young women students’ participation in their undergraduate mathematics degree programme: their gendered trajectory is characterized in terms of their being both ‘invisible’ in the dominant university mathematics community and yet ‘special’ in their self‐conception. It draws on data collected from a three‐year longitudinal project investigating students’ experiences of undergraduate mathematics at two comparable traditional universities in England. Specifically, students’ narratives are interpreted as providing insights into their defensive investments in their particular ways of participating. An interpretive feminist perspective is used to claim that these young women are involved in the ongoing redefining of the gendering of participation in mathematics, and conveys how they manage to choose mathematics, and achieve in university mathematics, whilst in many respects adhering to everyday views of femininity.

Leitmotif

No one could see [the witch] Serafina from where she was; but if she wanted to see any more, she would have to leave her hiding place. …There was one thing she could do; she was reluctant because it was desperately risky, and it would leave her exhausted; but it seemed there was no choice. It was a kind of magic she could work to make herself unseen. True invisibility was impossible, of course: this was mental magic, a kind of fiercely held modesty that could make the spell worker not invisible but simply unnoticed. Holding it with the right degree of intensity, she could pass through a crowded room, or walk beside a solitary traveller, without being seen. (Pullman, 1998, p. 35)

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Professor Margaret Brown and Dr Sheila Macrae who contributed to the development of many of the ideas in this paper and the Economic and Social Research Council for funding this research (grant number R000238564).