Although the gender gap in academia has narrowed, females are underrepresented within some fields in the USA. Prior research suggests that the imbalances between science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields may be partly due to greater male interest in things and greater female interest in people, or to off-putting masculine cultures in some disciplines. To seek more detailed insights across all subjects, this article compares practising US male and female researchers between and within 285 narrow Scopus fields inside 26 broad fields from their first-authored articles published in 2017. The comparison is based on publishing fields and the words used in article titles, abstracts, and keywords. The results cannot be fully explained by the people/thing dimensions. Exceptions include greater female interest in veterinary science and cell biology and greater male interest in abstraction, patients, and power/control fields, such as politics and law. These may be due to other factors, such as the ability of a career to provide status or social impact or the availability of alternative careers. As a possible side effect of the partial people/thing relationship, females are more likely to use exploratory and qualitative methods and males are more likely to use quantitative methods. The results suggest that the necessary steps of eliminating explicit and implicit gender bias in academia are insufficient and might be complemented by measures to make fields more attractive to minority genders.

I had been exercised for some time about how to stretch our most able students and those who have more prior mathematical knowledge, whilst at the same time support those with weaker backgrounds or who take a little longer to grasp the mathematical concepts we teach. When the opportunity came to put in a bid for University funding I devised a project designed to address these two ambitions.The objectives included providing a weekly drop-in session where students could play various strategy board games and puzzles designed to hone and develop strategic thinking, alongside providing a safe place for them to obtain help on tutorial work. Having read John Mason et al's book on Mathematical Thinking for a review in Connections [1] I was aware that the ability to strategize does not always come easily to our students. Interestingly, and perhaps unexpectedly given the nature of the subject, the 2011 National Student Survey shows that mathematics students do not consider themselves to be good at problem solving [2]. Problem solving is one of the key employability attributes that we tell our students they will develop on a maths degree, so anything that can be done to aid and increase this is well worth doing.The proposal was presented with the help of two, then second year, students to a University 'Dragons' Den' style panel. The panel were slightly sceptical but were won over, in part, by the students' enthusiasm and dramatic skills.The project began in September 2010. Having researched a number of strategy games and puzzles a wide-ranging selection was assembled and leaflets were produced to advertise the "Maths Arcade". An initial lecture on "How to Think Mathematically" [3] grabbed the attention of new year students and helped to draw the first students in. Attendance over two terms was fairly constant with about 25-30 attending each week. This included a core group of about 15 who came most weeks, with others coming less regularly on different occasions. Which Games?The intention was not to start another Chess Club but rather to increase interaction between students and to get them talking about the games and the strategies involved rather than just enjoying playing competitively. There are a number of quite unusual board games on the market. One of the students' favourites so far is "Quarto" which contains playing pieces with four different attributes:

introduces seven little-known tales illustrating that theoretical work may lead to practical applications, but it can't be forced and it can take centuries.

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Florence Nightingale is known for her nursing skills in the Crimean War. This article shows how she used her mathematical and statistical knowledge to advise the British Army and government on the best approaches for medical data collection and management, thus significantly reducing mortality rates. Many of the problems she described are just as relevant today.