Women in Maths Day goes virtual in 2020

ACEMS led a national video campaign to celebrate International Women in Mathematics Day 2020. It was only the second year for the worldwide celebration and COVID-19 made it impossible to hold face-to-face gatherings.

To counter that, ACEMS worked with the Women in Maths Special Interest Group (WIMSIG) from the Australian Mathematical Society (AustMS) to get as many women mathematicians and statisticians from around the country to take part in a video campaign.

The messages were designed to inspire girls to consider maths and stats in their education or career, and to spotlight the importance of the work being done by women in maths and stats. More than 70 women from around Australia - and from several other parts of the world - sent in video greetings. They were from the following institutions/organisations with many of the women having connections with ACEMS through being current members, alumni or have a relationship with ACEMS members:

• Australian National University
• Bureau of Meteorology
• Curtin University
• Deakin University
• Edith Cowan University
• Imperial College, London
• Inventia Life Science
• Monash University
• Queensland University of Technology (QUT)
• RMIT University
• Technology University of Delft, Netherlands
• The University of Adelaide
• The University of Melbourne
• University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka
• University of South Australia
• University of Southern Queensland (USQ)
• University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Sri Lanka
• UNSW Sydney
• University of Technology Sydney (UTS)
• University of Western Australia

In all, the videos got more than 10,000 views on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. They also generated more than 400,000 tweet impressions (the number of times a tweet appears in someone’s timeline).

The complete list of video messages from these amazing women can be accessed here.

ACEMS and WIMSIG also put together several compilation video messages: