Abstract:

How women in our society have been seen and valued has changed in every century. Nowadays, women and men are supposedly equal, with women occupying essential roles in the development of society. In school we learned the names of famous mathematicians, but were there any women among them? This article deals with how women and men have been represented in articles related to mathematics. Our main goal here is to check what place women have had and still have in the field of mathematics.

To the best of our knowledge and based on the Web of Science data base and what has been published in scientific journals, the problem of the role of women in mathematics has never been analyzed. To fill this gap, we analyzed 40,948 articles indexed in Web of Science Core Collection written by 70,051 authors. It was possible to establish the gender of the authors of 28,039 articles. Among them, 13,315 were written only by men, whereas 8,716 only by women; 6,008 were jointly written by both men and women. Our analysis identified the main authors who, during the period from 1899 to 2019, played key roles in research connected to mathematics and also who put out the most substantial and influential publications.