The Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, based in Toronto, Canada, will promote an online event on November 18 in which five scientists and students from different countries and institutions will present work in areas such as algebra, geometry and algorithm development. . At the same time, speakers will discuss how being gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender relates to their academic life. It is the third year in a row that the institute, the most important Canadian research center in mathematics, has organized the event, entitled LGBTQ+Math Day. The initiative is part of the institution’s strategy to make the discipline, predominantly male and tied to gender stereotypes, become more welcoming and attractive to all people.
German Katrin Wehrheim, a researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, in the United States, will speak about her work in a field known as symplectic geometry and her advocacy to expand the female presence in mathematics and promote inclusive education for LGBT+ students in Berkeley. “I will share some stories of my struggles for truth in symplectic geometry and in education to combat oppression,” wrote Wehrheim in the summary of his presentation. The American Tyler Kelly, a professor at the University of Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, will present his studies on a topic in algebraic geometry called mirror symmetry and will address his militancy in entities such as the Mathematical Society of London to expand the inclusion of minorities – in a lecture entitled “Out of the closet and into the mirror”. Joseph Nakao, a doctoral student at the University of Delaware, in the United States, will discuss some of his research interests, such as the development of algorithms with application in plasma physics, and will explain, from his experience, how mathematics departments can support students queer a term that generically designates people who do not fit into traditional gender patterns.
The event was conceived and organized by Anthony Bonato, a professor at the Metropolitan University of Toronto, with the aim of promoting contact networks between LGBT+ students and researchers in the discipline and increasing its visibility and acceptance. In an opinion piece published in September in the magazine nature, Bonatto stated that being openly gay was essential for him to reach his full scientific potential. “When I did my doctorate in the 1990s, I believed that mathematics was mathematics and not a subject tied to my identity,” he said. “My outlook changed the day a professor told me that being openly gay made other colleagues in the department uncomfortable and I should keep my sexuality to myself so I could fit in. I questioned my place in mathematics, because I could no longer separate the objective world of equations and homophobia.”
In more than two decades of career, Bonato has seen inclusion evolve in a positive way. Among the milestones, he highlighted in the article the creation, still in the 1990s, of an association of LGBT+ mathematicians, Spectra, today with just over 310 members, which promoted the formation of support networks based on 250 “allies”, teachers mobilized to make the academic environment more welcoming. There is no specific data on how many LGBT+ people work in the discipline. According to a 2016 U.S. national survey of LGBT+ professionals in the Stem (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, Queer in Stem, 57% of 1,427 respondents reported that half or more of their peers knew their sexual orientation in the workplace. job. That rate was higher than the average percentage recorded in the US workforce, at 47%, according to a 2014 survey by the Human Rights Campaign Foundation.
An association of LGBT+ mathematicians, Spectra, has more than 300 members and 250 “allies,” professors who foster a welcoming academic environment.
In academic life, as Bonato pointed out in a text published on his personal blog, he also felt more accepted. Although he faced prejudice from colleagues in the department, he was comfortable working at the Canadian university, which, like many others in the United States and Europe, created policies for welcoming minorities and for gender equity. “I have many LGBT+ peers and many allies among my heterosexual peers. Our dean tweets about inclusion and teachers put rainbow flags on their Facebook profiles during LGBT+ Pride month,” he said.
mathematicians queer they have participated in conferences aimed at inclusion in the Stem areas for some time, but only recently have events of this nature linked exclusively to the discipline emerged. In June 2019, a five-day conference organized by Autumn Kent, a transgender researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Harry Bray, from George Mason University, both in the United States, sought to stimulate collaboration between LGBT+ mathematicians in the areas of geometry. , topology and dynamical systems. The support of the Fields Institute, which has a tradition of promoting diversity, although with a focus on expanding the presence of women in the career, was important to give visibility to the inaugural event, held in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic.
In Brazil, the debate on expanding the space in mathematics for LGBT+ students and researchers has had recent developments, but with a focus on studies on gender and inclusive education. In 2020, the research group MatematiQueer: Studies of Gender and Sexualities in Mathematics Education was registered with the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq). Based at the Institute of Mathematics of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (IM-UFRJ), it brings together more than 80 professors and students working in lines of investigation that relate mathematics education to human rights, sexual minorities and gender relations. “This field of research is new,” says the group’s leader, Agnaldo da Conceição Esquincalha, professor at IM-UFRJ and at the institution’s Graduate Program in Mathematics Teaching. “We also have a social commitment, which is to show LGBT+ people that the exact sciences are equally for them.”
One of the concerns of MatematiQueer members is to analyze why the discourse has been strengthened according to which mathematics is a place of neutrality and its contents cannot mix with historical, cultural, social or political issues. “In teaching, this neutrality does not exist”, says Esquincalha. The idea of neutral territory, he observes, makes it difficult for teachers in the area to deal with the problems that their students experience and bring to the classroom, and can even lead LGBT+ students to move away from the discipline, perceiving it as refractory. to your sexual orientation. Mathematics professor Tadeu Silveira Waise, who completed his master’s degree in 2021 at MatematiQueer, says he became interested in this line of investigation when he realized that several students he taught privately were LGBT+ like him and felt free to bring up questions and anxieties. that did not emerge in the school environment. “The school doesn’t usually deal with these matters,” he says.
Dan Cristian Padure
One of the group’s first initiatives was to apply a questionnaire to mathematics undergraduate students in Rio de Janeiro to assess how they saw the approach to topics such as sexual and gender diversity in basic education classes and what kind of discussion they had had in this regard. in your training. About 5,000 questionnaires were sent and 710 people responded. Many responses were offensive. “There were people calling us crazy, saying that we should study Isaac Newton or lamenting the fact that the teachers were no longer priests, as in the religious schools of old,” says Waise, who analyzed the results of the survey in his master’s thesis, defended in 2021.
There were 264 responses in favor of approaching the issue of sexual and gender diversity with math classes, but 50 said they did not know how to do this. Fifty-one respondents suggested approaching gender issues through statistical data, exploring in the classroom, for example, the reading of graphs, while 56 opined that this work could be done in conversation circles, lectures and dialogues about respect and prejudice. . Thirteen suggested the use of interdisciplinary projects and 6 an approach through studies of historical personalities in mathematics belonging to minorities.
According to Esquincalha, social markers influence learning. “If a teacher is a white man, the relationship between the class and the math class is one way. If he’s black, it’s someone else’s. If he is white and gay, the dynamic is also different,” he says. This goes for students. He notes that mathematical knowledge is often used as a reference to define who is intelligent and who is not. “This generates exclusion, propagating the false idea that girls are not good at math and, consequently, should not pursue scientific and technological careers”, he explains. An inverse effect is that for minority groups or marginalized individuals, math aptitude can eventually become a tool of power. “I speak from personal experience. I suffered bullying at school when I was a child and heard swearing related to my sexuality. When they realized I was good at math, the same classmates who swore at me approached me wanting to be my friend. And when other people made fun of me, they defended me. I noticed that my relationship with mathematics has an impact on other social relationships.” This perception, he observes, was not summarized in his personal experience, but was observed in a master’s research by mathematics professor Hygor Batista Guse, defended this year, under the guidance of Esquincalha.
In the list of participants in the research group, a trans woman recently arrived, Erikah Pinto Souza, a mathematics teacher in the municipal schools of two cities in the Metropolitan Region of Fortaleza, in Ceará, Maranguape and Itaitinga. That year, she completed her master’s degree at the Universidade Federal Rural do Semi-Árido (Ufersa) with an ethnographic study with three transvestite teachers from public schools in Ceará. His doctoral project at MatematiQueer will deal with pedagogical and creative practices that oppose the idea of the neutrality of mathematics. She herself used strategies of this type in her eight years as an elementary school teacher and working in teacher training in Ceará. “I used a dossier on murders of trans people or data from the Hotline on Transphobia to do statistical analysis. Based on those numbers, I developed with the students concepts that needed to be addressed in math classes, such as arithmetic averages and creating and interpreting graphs,” she explains.
According to the teacher, such strategies were always supported by official pedagogical documents that recommended relating social problems and the reality of students with theoretical content. She claims that she never had any problems with the students nor was she disrespected by them. “Students saw the content calmly, as it related to the reality of the school. At a school where I was the principal, I had two transgender students, aged 11 and 12,” she says. But she faced prejudice from peers when she taught math teacher training classes. “There were those who did not accept having a transvestite as a teacher-trainer”, says Erikah Souza.