2022 Texas Women in Math Symposium

This NSF award provides support for Texas Women in Math Symposium (TWIMS) at Rice University in Houston, Texas on February 5-6, 2022. The TWIMS is a conference series that takes place at a different institution in Texas each academic year. The ongoing goals of the TWIMS conference series are to highlight the research and professional accomplishments of outstanding, established female mathematicians, to provide a supportive platform for early career women mathematicians to showcase their research, to facilitate connections among Texas-based mathematicians that lead to long-lasting professional relationships, and to create an inclusive environment to discuss issues facing women in mathematics.

The conference is open to participants of any gender and will feature opportunities for collaboration between mathematicians of all career levels and across several mathematical subfields. By fostering these collaborations, TWIMS 2022 will contribute to the advancement of mathematical research and will encourage early career researchers to continue to work in the mathematical sciences.

The inclusion of individuals from dissimilar backgrounds leads to the advancement of research. Increasing the number of people interested in pursuing math research and diversifying the backgrounds of researchers increases the number of perspectives from which any math problem is considered. This is key to the advancement of the field as a whole.

At each career stage we see attrition of women in mathematics at rates disproportionately higher than those of men. In order to increase retention of women at every career stage, the institutional barriers preventing women from reaching their full potential need to be removed. Some of these barriers include the prevalence of negative societal gender stereotypes, lack of diverse representation and role models, and lack of encouragement from teachers and mentors.

TWIMS aims to address these problems directly with the explicit goal of contributing to and in retention of women in math at every career stage. To this end, the symposium will showcase the research of a diverse array of distinguished invited speakers to provide examples of successful women in math who can be role-models to younger mathematicians or women at an earlier stage in their careers.

TWIMS will provide engaging opportunities to build mentor/mentee relationships by featuring small group breakout sessions and a career advancement panel. Furthermore, participants will examine gender issues in mathematics with the goal to mitigate gender-based problems. Positive professional and academic experiences, the promotion of woman-identifying role models in mathematics, the existence of encouraging and supportive communities of women mathematicians, and effective mentorship are necessary to decrease attrition among women in the mathematical sciences.

TWMS will provide these experiences and facilitate the growth of a supportive inclusive mathematical community for women in math at every stage of their careers, allowing them to contribute to the advancement of the mathematical sciences. The conference website is https://sites.google.com/view/twims-2022/about.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.