[der_ketzer]

I think it's all psychological and the way we are educated. Many people doesn't study an engineer career because math is very difficult. But in fact, at the math faculty where I study, there are more females than males studying math, and in engineering there are more males than females. Something I don't understand.

[stonemetal]

I would hazard a guess that since teaching is a pink collar profession you would find more females in the Math Department since some of them plan on teaching it in high school. This doesn't happen for engineering since engineering isn't taught in high school. (Note: at least in the US to teach something at the high school level you typically major in it at the university level as well as taking teaching courses on the side.) The only female I know in graduate school math wants to teach college.

[yummyfajitas]

In my experience, most of those women are trying to be math teachers. If you create an actual Math Education major, they will vanish.

[btilly]

My experience strongly disagrees. In my most advanced undergraduate math classes, and then my graduate school days there were a lot of women. Most of whom seemed to want to become mathematicians. The statistic I saw at the time said that women were 40% of people in graduate school in math nationwide.

This struck me as incredibly odd when every discipline that used a lot of math had very low numbers of women. Purportedly because "women find math hard". With the result that when I took a third year differential equations course, there was a sea of men. In my fourth year number theory course, half the (admittedly small) class were women.

Those numbers may have changed radically since.