Quantifying Inequities and Documenting Elitism in PhD-granting Mathematical Sciences Departments in the United States

Abstract

Using data about PhD-granting institutions in the United States and publicly available funding data from the National Science Foundation, we highlight inequalities based on gender in mathematical sciences departments at US institutions of higher education. We provide an example of the application of quantitative techniques, tools, and topics from mathematics and data science to analyze the mathematics community itself in order to quantify and document inequalities in our discipline. Specifically, we determine that a small fraction of mathematical sciences departments receive a large majority of federal funding awarded to support mathematics in the United States. Additionally, we quantify the extent to which women faculty members are unequally represented in mathematical sciences departments at PhD-granting institutions in the United States. We also show that this underrepresentation of women faculty is even more pronounced in departments that received more federal grant funding.

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Buckmire, R., Diaz Eaton, C., Hibdon Jr., J.E., Kauba, J., Lewis, D., Ortega, O., Pabon, J., Roca, R., & Vindas-Melendez, A.R. (2025). Quantifying and Documenting Gender-Based Inequalities in the Mathematical Sciences in the United States. In Garcia-Cardona, C., Lee, H. (eds) Advances in Data Science. Association for Women in Mathematics Series, vol 37. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-87804-6_16