International Women's Day, celebrated on 8 March, is an occasion for an even louder reminder of the importance of gender equality in building the prosperity and well-being of societies. Members of our community of practice have also engaged in various initiatives to promote gender equality in the research and development sector.
The campus of the Frederick University in Nicosia hosted the exhibition 'Women in Mathematics: A gallery of portraits from around the world', which features female mathematicians from around the world. It was first presented in Berlin in 2016 and has since travelled to more than 130 locations on different continents.
The exhibition came to campus thanks to the efforts of the Women in Mathematical Sciences in Cyprus (WMSC) network, that is the Cypriot branch of the European Women in Mathematics Network. The network's goal is to increase the visibility and recognition of women’s contribution in mathematical sciences. Dr Petroula Mavrikiou, the vice president of the network and the director of the University’s Gender Equality and Inclusion Research Unit says that hosting the exhibition is a part of Frederick University’s long-term campaignto tackle the underrepresentation of girls and women in STEM areas.
More information on the project ‘Women of mathematics from around the world. A gallery of portraits’ is available on: https://womeninmath.net
More information on Frederick University’s campaign for girls and women in engineering and technology is available on: https://www.frederick.ac.cy/women-in-STEM/el/home-en
The Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw contributed to the annual conference ‘Polka XXI wieku’ (Polish woman of the 21st century). Seventy top managers, social activists, experts, representatives of government and local administration met to discuss the most important issues for women during roundtables and debates. One of the eight thematic areas was local government. Dr Olga Kotowska-Wójcik, an assistant professor from the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw took part in a discussion on this topic, and presented the main assumptions of gender equality plans.
The National Information Processing Institute was promoting a book “Kobiety w technonauce. Biografie zawodowe profesorek” (Women in technoscience. Professional biographies of female professors”), authored by dr Anna Knapińska, an assistant professor in the Laboratory of Databases and Businees Analytics.
The author has noted that the underrepresentation of women is a result of the rules applied to the technoscience field. She has tried to reconstruct the world of female professors and to understand the meanings they give to experiences, turns and changes in the course of their own careers. She depicted the social world of women in the technoscience by means of a biographical method, interviewing twelve representatives of disciplines within medical, natural, agricultural and technical fields of science.
The book is available on: https://opi.org.pl/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Kobiety-w-technonauce.-Biografie-zawodowe-profesorek-e-book.pdf (in Polish only)
