3349

Lovisa Sumpter

philosophy of mathematics education

2014

28

Conceptions , female mathematicians , gender , higher education , post-PhD

In this paper, I explore four Swedish female mathematicians arguments for why they decided not to work in academia after finishing their PhD. These stories were merged into one narrative, the fictive voice of Sarah. Her story describes life as a female PhD student in a mathematics department as a positive experience. The two main reasons to why she decided not to stay at the university were (1) the difficulty of getting a job, and (2) her wanting to work with applications and problem solving instead of working with the development of theories.