The Toronto Star – Paul Hunter
“As a teenager beginning high school in his Ivory Coast homeland, Ismael Mourifié looked around his classroom and understood something was inherently wrong. He’d been placed in the math stream based on an admission exam that determined aptitude. But among the almost 45 students, there were only four or five girls. The next year, that number dropped to two. It didn’t make any sense, Mourifié thought. Math isn’t an innate skill; there shouldn’t be such a dramatic gender disparity. Fast-forward almost two decades and Mourifié is now an assistant professor of economics at the University of Toronto. He teaches courses in applied econometrics and quantitative methods but his passion, and a big part of his research, is grounded in his memories from the classrooms of West Africa. He is driven to understand why there aren’t more women that pursue studies, particularly math, that lead to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) jobs and how that imbalance can be corrected.” (more)