 Thank you Pierre for the kind introduction. Tonight we are excited to welcome Catherine Goldstein and Clémence Péronnais for a conference on female role models and how they can or cannot contribute to improve gender equality in sciences. So we are particularly lucky to have some of them with us today. So we have Aline Lefevre-Lepeau, Nina Autaire, Laura Cuivy and Tivot that are present with us in the room. So what are they doing? Aline is working on mathematical models and algorithms simulating the behavior of granular media and viscous suspensions at Central Supelec. Nina is working at Orsay and she's interested in topological data analysis while Laura is a specialist in scientific computing and director of the mathematics department at UNS Paris-Saclay and finally T is working at NCA in Evry and is interested in applying mathematics to be biology and ecology. So being a woman in STEM has faced me with some challenges as we all know especially in mathematics there are not a lot of women. Women are a minority. Therefore it hasn't always been easy for me to project myself as a mathematician. That's why I think that today's event by Just Do Matt is crucial for future mathematicians and for future generation of mathematicians. Role models show that there is a path and a place for female mathematicians. I'm particularly thankful for the guidance of Susanna Zimmermann, a great mathematician and an even greater inspiration. Every year she organizes a master class for M1 students with a particular condition. The participants have to be at least 50% women. So I had I experienced this master class last year and it inspired me and introduced me to a lot of talented mathematicians who had a shared vision and experience of mathematics. So now a few words about today's speakers tonight's speakers. So Catherine Goldstein is a mathematician and historian of mathematics at Institut de Mathématiques de Justieux Paris Rive Gauche who before moving to Paris spent more than 20 years at Horset. Clémence Peronnais is a sociologist with a particular interest in sociology of scientific knowledge, sociology of culture and the sociology of gender. She works at the Centre Max Weber. Alongside Claire Marc and Olga Paris Romaskiewicz, Clémence has just published a book on gender equity in mathematics for which Catherine has written the preface. Note that the book will be available at the end of the conference for purchase. We want this conference to be interactive. So please don't shy to answer to Catherine and Clémence's questions. As there are people with us online it is important that you speak clearly and loudly. The same will be true for the Q&A session at the end of the conference. As some people have a shuttle bus to catch to get back home after this event keeping the clock is crucial so I will remind you about five minutes before the end of your presentation so this way we'll have enough time for the Q&A session with the audience. So this being said I now give floor to Catherine and Clémence for the conference. Enjoy. So thank you very much Audrey. Thank you all for coming. So in fact the main talk will be the talk by Clémence and I will just provide an introduction essentially to explain a bit to you. The surge of interest and concern in the question of women and mathematics and I must say that for me who knew this institute in the last century in the 1980s and 1980s and 1990s it is very strange to listen and to hear about such an event in this building was really a high place for misogynist people at that time so but now it's no more the case so I'm very happy. So let me begin by some data. So the data are the data about the women mathematician professional mathematician in mathematical academia in France so as you see in general there is about 22% of women in the mathematical academia but there are a lot of differences so here you have the data for pure mathematics applied mathematics. I put the computer science just as a reminder of the difference with some other fields nearby and also the situation in the CNRS and it's already interesting because you see a lot of differences between for instance what happens in pure mathematics the percentage of full professor women in mathematics is very low and one of our colleague Christian Castle spoke some years ago of endangered species in fact the number of full professor in pure mathematics the women will disappear in 2050 with this decrease in the last years and the situation is much better in applying mathematics but again there is what is called glass sealing between the number of researcher and associate professor and the numbers of full professor. So just to have a sort of international comparison it's a bit early on so 2005 I don't have such a data for a more recent period but you can see immediately the differences depending on the countries and it was one of the first things which struck us when we began to study this sort of data a long time ago it's the difference among countries which are very near or very close for their mathematical level sometimes but are in fact very different confronted to the situation of women in academia and I think it's a very good argument for people who still now explain that all this is a biological factors because I don't know really the difference the biological difference between Portuguese French or British women I must say but still if you look at the data it is very different in these different countries okay you can see for instance Switzerland six percent but in Portugal almost 50 percent so why is it so bizarre and why does it launch the certain anxiety in French it's because the situation in France contrary to other countries is stable it is stable from the 90s to essentially now there was about 22 percent of women in the mathematical academia in the 90s and it's the same now and you can see that for the other countries it's not the same there were a lot of well increase sometimes a lot sometimes not but an increase of the percentage of women mathematicians in other countries in fact just another data to confirm that the situation in France is really stable for a long time it's the number of women mathematicians in the CNRS and you can see well this is this blue line oops I'm sorry I'm not very I will probably change this I'm left handed is it better slightly so it's really stable while this is the number of men and as you see the situation is very different so it is quite general in fact and it doesn't affect only the mathematical academia here there's very recent data showing the difference in several countries in Europe in the scientist and engineer population the young one so between 25 and 34 years old and you can see the difference between men and women and the difference between 10 years ago and now and you see that for France well the situation is not much better while in some other country there was an increase of course in the number of the percentage of of women which is much much more drastic and in some case it has even be almost the same as the percentage of of male okay and just for the road this thing it is the same in fact and it is even worse for the population of the master students which can interest some of you particularly uh if we compare the percentage in the last decade and now you see here that uh oops mathematics and only mathematics it's the the field where the percentage of women decreased during this last decade while in all other fields it has increased okay so it's a very spectacular uh data I think so to summarize uh important national differences important disciplinary differences including inside mathematics a certain glass ceiling but that's very current and especially no substantial progress made in France and one factor which has been most discussed is that France is the country of the reforms as you know we have a reform in higher education or education every two years and normally these reforms has have an effect on the percentage of women in mathematics and normally it's a bad effect and the last data uh this is of course very much commented uh in the the newspapers recently we are back with the last reform of two years ago we are back to the percentage of women for scientific baccalaureate we had in the 60s while it was almost equality in 2020 so it's quite spectacular again so what to do about that I show you the solution suggested by the CNRS in the program integer uh a big program international program uh well the CNRS participated uh 10 years ago and they have proposed 14 priority access and 37 measures from supporting gender study to supporting child care costs for conferences or even work at home not sure it's a complete good solution but uh and the red one here are the the one were a bit implemented for instance proposing a woman more women for CNRS prices and awards and some in particular in green were not essentially all those which included money and recruitment so among these uh solution there is one which is not very expensive and it is uh the fact that we have to develop feminine role models in mathematics and it has been done at a large scale since uh 10 years in particular and so I would like to comment a bit the solutions uh of the role models uh Clemence will discuss that uh in more detail in our talk but I would just to to give you a few of my opinion about that so here you are for instance uh the first page of a suggestion of the Max Planck Gesellschaft in Germany which is called female scientist and historical trailblazer trailblazers it means pioneer pioneers and uh so the site proposes to present some portraits of women in science historical essentially women and it's presented like that female science pioneers in history we persevered despite facing off a daunting social obstacle so I don't think it's very encouraging in fact but my opinion so this is essentially this uh idea of role model often there are historical role models uh and I have a problem as a now historian of mathematics because the inner life the daily life the values of people are really very difficult to understand uh very difficult to document for historical figures and uh more or less to and even more to convert to a contemporary public so uh the contemporary situation the personnel and collective values we have now and the concrete needs we have for instance the need for her work for a career are very different from this historical situation and very often the gaps we have in the documentation or in the historical presentation of this woman they are filled by myths and stereotypes about women and about mathematics what should be a woman so you have a lot of of issues for instance about was was she beautiful or not as a historical figure who cares I never heard such a question about Poincaré and uh and about mathematics mathematics is for geniuses it's a very difficult subject it should remain a difficult subject so this woman were particularly uh very geniuses or even uh worse than that and so uh and essentially uh there are models of triumphs against obstacle global success or global victimization I just want you to give you one example which is from a page of one of the university I depend on university Paris it's a site called woman forgotten from history and they have Sophie Germain and they say for instance at the end of the 18th century it seems scandalous that a woman was studying science certainly not what was the problem for Sophie Germain is to have access to the advanced courses at the Ecole Polytechnique because the Ecole Polytechnique was a a school training for careers and civil or military engineers and of course at the time women can't be engineers on the ground so the the school was not open to women she works in number theory and proved Fermat's great theorem this is a scoop so the the Fermat last theorem was proved in fact it's a very important theorem in mathematics dating back to the from the 17th century it would prove in the 19th century in the 20th century sorry 1994 by Andrew Wiles and a lot of modern techniques what Sophie Germain proved was an interesting a new theorem a technical one which is difficult to explain to a general audience without in two sentences but a very professional I would say now theorem and for instance on a death certificate she is listed as a rentier which in those days were more honorable for a woman than being listed as a mathematician no no issue of honorability nobody male or female is indicated as mathematician because it was not a career it was not a profession you could be a professor for instance at the university and paid for that you could be our wife which is a status but certainly no mathematician okay so in fact if you look at the various role models we have in the literature they are all somehow imaginary okay and I don't see a lot of differences between the imaginary portrait of Ipatia we're supposed to be the first genius in mathematics we have absolutely no trace of her except one line in an encyclopedia published a sixth century after its death potential death but we have a literature up to the ceiling about what she could have done or she could have thought or she could have been through and so on and so on or of course completely imaginary character like Catherine Janeway my favorite in the Star Trek series a captain and a scientist of which we know a lot because it was created by the writers of the series or somebody we know really some things but not all like Sophie Jamma and as I showed you a lot of a website or portrait of Sophie Jamma are completely reconstructed with mythical elements borrowed to what the people think this woman could have thought or could have been through so often presented as martyrs victims pioneer geniuses perfect and so on while the concrete life and now the career conditions are very different from this woman let be a wheel or not I don't think I can be a space captain for the moment so and I don't think you can be really but it could be attractive perhaps especially for younger persons but not necessarily applicable or replicable so just to finish with that I would like to finish with a personal note of things which have been important for me and to support or see the exhibit which is in the other room it is the fact that I don't think that one role model is so useful but testimonies and interviews of a lot of women mathematician and especially contemporary women mathematician describing their views and their experiences including not so good ones were for me very useful to see the doubts to see the problems to see how they change their minds about what mathematics should be done or with room to work and so on that was very concrete and that was very useful and I can recommend you something from Orsay publication Mathématiques d'Orsay it's online and several it's from 74 it gives you an idea about my age and it's still I think very relevant and there is a testimony by Michel Verne which I liked especially she spoke about this place in the 70s Emmanuel don't look at that you know the text I suppose and the other thing which was very important for me was to have a large variety of partial models so there are some women in mathematics which I met in my career and they are all very important they're all very different and the fact that they're all very different I was not identified with any of them but that proved to me that there was a lot of possibility to become a researcher with a lot of partial model and that was for me more important that having one specific historical figure to refer to so it is essentially what is done in the in the whole way so I but I think it's important that there are many different women in mathematics and it means recruiting different women in mathematics too and we will see if it is also something which is relevant for younger persons and so I will pass the floor to Clemence to discuss thank you thank you so much I'm not sure how to switch presentations just to start I wanted to say a few words to explain the context of this presentation as was said I'm a sociologist and what I'm about to present to you are the results of a sociological study study that I carried out and that and I recently published the results in the book matters and it means math girls and so yeah you have it now so everything I'm about to say is results from this study that was published in this book recently and so today we are going to explore together carrying on on what Catherine said what role models can mean today for young girls for teenage girls who are pretty interested in mathematics so as a sociologist have been interested in the issue of social inequalities before science for a while now I've been exploring gender inequalities but not only I've also studied class inequalities and race inequalities so to put it simply the way science and math are sexist elitist and racist and how it structures the way we do science later on but my last study was really focused on mathematics and on girls who still enjoy doing math at 16 years old and has Catherine said they just became the priority in France with the last educational reform so those girls I was I had the opportunity to oh sorry I missed the slides I had the opportunity to carry the sociological study with those girls with my colleague sociologist Alice Pavie we used pretty usual methods that we use in sociology so we spent two weeks observing girls that were participating in a math camp organized by researchers in the south of France then we interviewed 45 girls individually interviews lasted between 45 minutes and two hours we talked about their families what they experience in schools but also their models and aspirations we also carried a corpus analysis on the cover letters that the girls send to get admitted into the the math camp and finally we had some questionnaires at the end of the of their experience but today I'm mostly going to talk about what we discovered in the interviews and just to give you a few informations on the on the girls that we studied a final world about them most of them are from a pretty privileged background because when you invite girls to come to a math camp many of them who come are daughters of math teachers and engineers so a lot of them are actually daughters of math teachers and engineers but also some of them come from less privileged and working class backgrounds role models let's dive in in order to try and understand what was going on with these teenage girls Alice Pavie my colleague and I we asked a pretty simple question or so we thought we asked the girls are they any people real or fictional who inspire you or who you feel like you resemble or you feel some kind of connection of kinship with them and then are any of them connected to math or science so it was kind of a two-part question who do you feel you look like who inspires you and then any connection with math or science and this is Lea Lea really loved my question because she was already ready for it I had no idea but she had in a phone a list of 19 characters that she felt looked like her and inspired her and where really she called them it was kinship between her and the characters all of them from mangas and animes a few of them a few of them karma from assassination classroom why is very intelligent and ironic ok i was from an IQ he has the god complex and better than everyone else he needs to be on a winding streak nero from my hero academia is calm and intelligent Eren from adagon titan quite a manipulative character and then a gojo the strongest nonchalant arrogant unsympathetic and cruel so that was the who looks like you and who do you feel some kind of kinship with 19 that's only five there were 19 of them no girls I noticed but Lea noticed as well and she said it's so frustrating that there are no girls I think that girls are less developed as characters than guys in those stories or the girls characters that are developed are not like me at all and this is a a sentiment that many other girls shared with her and they noticed that yes indeed example of women that inspired them especially when it came to science math and intelligence were pretty hard to find and there is another example that I really liked another girl when asked do you have any role model in science any women role models in science and she said well a female scientific role model the only one I can think of is my is my father but is not a woman so yeah I don't think we we have enough role models this is was to be expected when you know what what girls have to face the point the starting point of this sociological study that we carried was that we think that it is indeed important and it is a key thing to have to have an availability of people that look like you and that you can see and identify yourself with in order to project yourself and you can find them in many places you can get models and inspirations from your real life from people around you that you know it can be your family friends of the family it can be professionals that you meet you can also find role models in can I have the pointer in the media they can be real people like celebrities of public figures oh yeah yeah celebrities of public figures you don't know them personally but they do exist and then a final type type of role models are people that are completely fictionals completely fictionals like all the characters from the anime and manga that we just talked about but any any kind of model can be useful to get this process of identification and that is some that in the in the in the phrasing you cannot be what you cannot see and so there is an importance to see people that look like you and that you feel kinship with in all kinds of activities but what we noticed with the girls is that they really do lack a female scientist as models they don't have them in real life and we've seen with Catherine because they don't they are not enough women in science and in math in particular so the consequence was that amongst the girls that we we surveyed most of them two third of them had never met a female researcher before they came to the math camp where they got lucky and met the only female mathematician of the team and the only a scientist female scientist that they knew were teachers and that is good because these are both extremely useful and important issue is that what they valued what they were interested in in these female models that they knew and had met was not their scientific value was not even their cognitive value or their intelligence they praised the women that they knew in scientific fields for the way that they cared about for instance their patients or their students so they really praised them for their software now for communication communication skills for for support and not really for scientific skills so two examples from that what Ada said about her teachers she said that she's small like me and even though she's small and the students make fun of her she sticks to her job and that's what she likes I identify with her and I want a student to identify with me in the future as well and also what Gael said about the medical professional that she met which if she was in the hospital my examples are the female doctors who operated on me they were so nice and one even said to me I've got a daughter the same age as you so you can see that she appreciated the caring part of the of the medical professional they are not enough examples of women scientists in the environment of girls and they cannot see them in the media because well not everyone has a math teacher or a mathematician as a parent but girls also lack role models in in the media they tend to know very little about scientific celebrities or personalities in general so when you ask do you know any famous scientists you get three answers Einstein Marie Curie Pifagoras then a blank and then you know that guy in the movie and four movies the the theory of everything that's the biopic of Stefan Hawking the one the one here is the in English it's the the man who knew infinity which is a biopic about mathematician Ramanujan the biopic about Alan Turing the imitation game and then the most seen and the most famous movie among high school girls hidden figures the biopic I'm sure you've heard about about the free black scientist who helped in the in the NASA so Catherine Johnson Dorothy Rogan and Mary Jackson but very few girls remember the names of all of those scientists and again especially for the women they don't really remember the science part of the movies or of the of the careers for instance for hidden figures they mostly remember the part about the fight for civil rights and the fight against racism and so they remember these women as being extremely brave in their in their fight against racism and discriminations but not really for what they did for the science that they that they represented so a lack of examples in their environment a like of example in the media and all of this is not surprising when you know about the history of science and particularly Catherine mentioned it also the way that female women female scientists have been actively erased from from science history and I think this is important to note that they have been erased and not simply forgotten and so I will I will borrow the word of historian Margaret Rositer she's the one who coined the term Matilda effect you may have heard about it but today we often hear that the Matilda effect is the fact that women are forgotten that's not what Rositer said as an historian she said was way stronger than that she said that women's historically subordinate place in science was not a coincidence it was not due to any lack of merit on their part but it was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science so not forgotten but actively hidden actively erased from the book from the archives from the history that has been told about science and that's why we lack examples and I checked while the girls were doing the the math camp they were in a prestigious mathematical institution called the CIRM the center for international meetings in mathematics if they went to the library which they did because they were excellent and very devoted students there were many books about famous mathematicians almost 90 books about male mathematician and if you really looked and I did five about female mathematicians as a result of this of this eraser and camouflage of them so women scientists have been erased from history and today the one that are currently living are just ignored so girls cannot find role models even if they look they have to look hard to find them in the media because today just just two figures concerning the the french situation in the media you have all all activities taken together 36 percent of airtime dedicated to women talking or doing things and still a huge part 70 percent of experts that you can find on tv on the radio or in the scientific press are still men and this has been progressing very slowly but we had a setback to with the pandemic and every time you have a crisis it goes back to the the previous numbers and this this kind of two-third one-third rule when it comes to participation of women experts in the news so lack of role models in their close environments but also in history and also in the contemporary media this as very we know that it has bad consequences for girls because we know that when they are provided with role models it can really have a positive impact and there is one study that is particularly interesting when it comes to this a study that was carried by a few colleagues in economy when they proved that even one visit from a female scientist in high school classrooms could have a positive effect on the representation and the aspirations of high school students so they compared what goes on in the classroom with the visit of a female scientist and with that and a few things that they proved is that thanks to the visit students are less likely to say things like men are better at science or men are more gifted when it comes to math and science they also noticed that when there is a visit from a female scientist you have a little more girls that later on decide to continue their study in math and science especially in preparatory preparatory classes and in bachelors in math physics and IT so there is an impact of female role models for instance one woman going and talking to a classroom of high school boys and girls but but the study the same study also proved that it doesn't work all the time and it doesn't work for everyone so it doesn't work all the time and it's really dependent on the person who goes and talk to the teenagers but it also doesn't concern everyone and they showed that the effect is way stronger for girls if they are already very good students and when they come from a more privileged background so it's more like the final push for girls who were on the verge and already pretty likely to go into science it doesn't have as much effect on girls who were less were more further away from going into these these studies so this is that's what I call the the paradox of role models and I wanted to find a few explanation as to why can it fail what can it have sometimes even counterproductive effects and a few reason why sometimes providing role models is not enough is because it can be a way to value individuals and individual individuality while forgetting or minimizing structural issues and especially gender-based violence so it can be a way to say well I did it so it's possible and maybe it's not that hard another issue obviously is when you show that women can come to science because they can have a complementary role and presence compared to men so naturalizing the skills or the taste for science two examples of that I got from the observation I mentioned earlier so these are quotes from female engineers who came and talked to the high school girls and try and encourage them to science to come to a science studies and then engineering one of them said well no one makes a difference between men and women today we've always very well received we know this is not true because we have studies about violence in the workplace for instance we know that one out of two female researchers are sexually harassed in the worst in the workplace so welcome not so much another say that well it's women who don't make the effort to put themselves forward and that if you just assert yourself then it's gonna be fine and another one said that well men and women have different qualities we as women are supposed to have more intuition and then she said that she was like the mother in her lab and in a workplace and that her male colleagues appreciated that from her you can see oh this is not good for encouraging women to take an equal place as men in science another issue with role models is when you give an example of a woman in science but then you focus on the role that men played in her life a career or her success and we go back to Sophie Germain we mentioned her earlier earlier this was the way she was given as an example to the the high school girls in during their math camp so there was Sophie Germain but then we talked a lot about three very famous men and the role they had in her life like us because he was the one who realized she was incredible or like Lagrange because he wanted to meet her so he deserves a mention because he realized she existed or Fourier because he was the one who got her into the academy this may be true but we have so many narratives about women scientists where the the attention is diverted from what they did and from their work to what men did and how the men helped her to became what she what she could be so this brings me to the the last issue that we can have when we bring role models forward it's also the fact that if you bring out models that are too exceptional too incredible too particular well then you are just showing an exception that confirms the exclusion of everyone else and so if you only put out forward exceptional women such as Marie Curie or even such as Sophie Germain or Emily du Chatelet well then they can only be the exception because they are too far away for girls to imagine that they could become someone like that and some of my historian colleagues I think put it very well because they say no we don't want we refuse to replace the cult of heroes that they already is in science by the cult of heroines and they show that these women these heroines they are often alibis often ways to prove to gender wash the discourse in science see we talk about Sophie Germain well then are we done with the gender and math thing all right let's do real math now this is also obviously an issue the last subject I wanted to to talk to you about today is fiction because well I think we've proved that girls can have a hard time finding models in their real life and in the media and as historical figures so what about fiction better no sadly fiction where everything could be possible everything should be possible doesn't provide much more models when it comes to science in the imaginary world as well women are the minority I've got colleagues who proved that for instance in children books you have twice as many male heroes as you have heroines so the fictional humanity is is even less equal than the the real humanity and this has consequences because going back to my girls and the first question who inspires you who do you relate to well the result of this is that girls in the absence of female scientists female scholars well they turn to male figures for intellectual and for scientific identification almost all the characters they associate with intelligence with cleverness and then with math and science are male characters a few examples these are Dr. House in the I'm sure you know the series is a genius if you're a manga reader these are two characters from extremely famous mangas one is Elle in Death Note girls know him love him say is so clever and logical and this is Dr. Stone in the manga Senku in the manga Dr. Stone he's the perfect scientific mind these are the three fictional characters that came back most in the in the girls examples cleverness logical thinking scientific thinking the closest thing to a model in fiction when it comes to mathematics for them in contrast they had a really hard time finding the equivalent with a female representation of intelligence cleverness or mathematics or female mathematician and this is no surprise because in fiction too men and women are really far from equal when it comes to mathematics and they are far from being treated equally so yes they are not that many fictional mathematicians that many movies or series made about math people but still we can find a few and what we can find in these books films tv series is a very unequal treatment of women in math so to to modelize what goes on and the most situations that come back and back I gave a few examples from movies but this is also true of books and tv series but on the one hand you have male mathematicians in fiction and they tend to have a gift of their own they have some kind of genius or talent it came from them and they are the first one who who have this gift or talent on the other hand women fictional mathematicians who are women tend to inherit the gift from a father or from an uncle or for a grandfather usually male figures male a male mathematician tend to be the main characters of the leaders female mathematicians are more often a secondary or a background character the first one are geniuses the second one are mostly hard workers they make a lot of effort the first one make central mathematical contribution the women tend to make more discreet or even invisible mathematical contribution in the story that's a negative trait but men male mathematicians in fictions tend to be rather obsessive a social they lack social skills this is a trait that is way less present in women who tend to be rather courageous stubborn but also with some kind of social skills and sometimes they even help other male mathematicians to gain more skills they tend to be in a dominant position where she tends to be in a subordinate position what's more male mathematicians have way more happy endings they find love they find success they find fame or money sometimes thanks to their mathematical talents this is not the case for women who tend to have a tragic ending and the lesson here is that if you try and pursue mathematics something's gonna go wrong that's what that what happens in agora so the the fictional telling of the the history of ipathia she dies she's stoned at the end i don't know if you've seen the movie gifted but it's the story of a girl who has an incredible gift in mathematics like her mother who committed suicide like her grandmother who is completely bonkers and in the end she becomes happy because she stops doing math that's a happy ending but well uh so the message that that is brought out by these movies is that it's always risky and there is a chance of not being happy if you are a woman who pursue mathematics it's kind of like a social sanction not to do it so girls don't really know those characters don't really identify with them but what they find in tv series in films in books are other female characters whom they identify with but the female characters that they like their preferred heroines are very different and they are liked for very different reasons than the than the male characters so some of them you know i hope as well they tend to be strong they tend to be serious and they tend to be kind so i'm sure you know ermion from the harry potter series books and and and movies you could describe ermion as an incredibly clever or brilliant person that's not really the way girls remember her how describe her she's described as rigorous serious hard-working never as completely brilliant and that's the way she is portrayed isn't she another another favorite is sophie from a halls moving castle who's been who's been described as very brave courageous fighting for her and a loved one another one is jane from the series jane the virgin who's really kind and she gives all of herself to a family to her son and to everyone around her so we've got these female role models that are really models of strength they are not um they don't have they don't really doubt their strength so it's not that women are feeble or you know or weak in any way they are strong they are very strong characters but they are strong in their kindness in their caring for others and not really in their intelligence or in their mental capacities so it's a very different portrait than the the guys we have they are inspiring for girls because they also have the capacity to resist in front of violence in front of difficulties and um they go through painful ordeals they go through difficulties but they come back they are resilient but they don't become vengeful they don't become hungry they just take it upon themselves and they carry on and um this is a very I think powerful quote from a girl who said that she loves sophie from halls moving castle because well she picks herself up she was cursed but who cares because in the end she meets haru the super strong musician and another I think very moving thing that a girl said and other girls said the same is that she likes that characters like Mulan characters like merida from disney movies they could fight when she was not able to so you've got strong women women who speak up arms who carry a sword who carry a bow and she loves them because she says that well they are the warriors that she couldn't be they fight to exist um and they fight to live the life they want to and they give her hope so you've got and this was a recurring thing these warriors strong important female characters and I wanted to end with the fact that they are really double-hedged heroines because yes they are strong yes they fight but they never completely go against what hurt them the most and these are the gender roles that they still have to respect and the norms that they still have to respect and if you issue with issues with those strong females and warriors that we have in fiction that girls love first one is that they kind of give the message that you have to be a tomboy if you want to be a successful girl so sometimes in order to be strong in order to be a better woman then you have to abandon some traits that are deemed feminine and kind of imitate the masculine another limit is that just has the science superstars that are presented very often they are always exceptional and incredible and super strong and and the best at what they do like maybe you recognized Buffy here and Katniss from the anger games and the last problem with them is that they teach girls to be resilient that is to take upon themselves hurt after hurt and to never to pick up arms but never go and destroy the cause of the problem and the cause of the hurt which is inequality patriarchal thinking and the gender norms that are still constraining them and so this brings me to to this conclusion about gender gender inequities in science and world models we don't have enough of them right now to inspire girls but we should be careful what we provide what kind of models we provide for them and to do better we need more diverse models Catherine gave a few ideas also what could could be a few and a good models for girls in science and math but we also need them to really challenge the gender norms more deeply and more completely and this way I think is the only way to change what I try to show which is the lack of female role models for thinking for creating things with your mind and for being deeply brilliant and intelligent thank you