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

TL;DR

This paper applies quantitative data science techniques to analyze inequities in U.S. mathematical sciences departments, revealing funding disparities and gender underrepresentation, especially in highly funded institutions.

Contribution

It introduces a quantitative analysis of inequity in mathematical sciences academia, focusing on funding distribution and gender representation using national data sources.

Findings

A small number of departments receive most federal funding.

Women faculty are underrepresented in PhD programs.

Underrepresentation of women is more severe in highly funded departments.

Abstract

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 inequity in our discipline. This work is a contribution to the new and growing interdisciplinary field recently termed "mathematics of Mathematics," or "MetaMath." Using data about PhD-granting institutions in the United States and publicly available funding data from the National Science Foundation, we highlight inequalities in departments at U.S. institutions of higher education that produce PhDs in the mathematical sciences. 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 identify the extent to which women faculty members are underrepresented in mathematical sciences 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.