[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.