Opinion By the numbers

Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian professor of mathematics at Stanford University, has boldly gone where no woman has gone before. On Wednesday, she became the first female mathematician to win the Fields medal — or, as pedants would have it, the International Medal for Outstanding Discoveries in Mathematics. Awarded by the International Mathematical Union once every four years to two to four outstanding mathematicians under 40, the prize is often described as the Nobel for mathematics. Established in 1936, the fact that it took nearly 80 years for a woman to breach this bastion of male dominance underlines how skewed the gender balance in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) fields is, and how challenging it is for the few women who make it to the highest echelons to be taken seriously by their male colleagues.

Nor is the Fields medal an outlier. The Abel Prize, which has been awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters since 2003, has chosen 14 winners so far, all men. Another prestigious award, the Wolf Prize, is yet to recognise the contribution of a woman. This is not all that surprising, though, when factoring in the striking disparity that exists in the academic study of numbers — some 70 per cent of the doctoral degrees in the field are earned by men.

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Historically, female mathematicians have had it tough: consider Hypatia, the great scholar who was killed by a mob of Christian zealots, Ada Lovelace, whose contribution to scientific computing is still doubted, or Emily Noether, described by Albert Einstein as “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began” but who couldn’t get a teaching job. Women are often discouraged from pursuing careers in STEM fields, in part because they lack role models. Mirzakhani’s win could change that, at least a little.