"Short films challenging culture and gender stereotypes" and "Women, gender(s), the Nobel Prize and physics" Response

Are there some who might be systematically excluded because they cannot imagine 'someone like them' in these roles? How can we minimize these kinds of barriers in our roles as teachers?

What can we do, as secondary school teachers of math and physics, to welcome women and other underrepresented groups of people into these disciplines?

I think as in many of the videos, and articles the common thread is that those who are not white-men have a difficult time seeing themselves as someone who can be a 'math person'. This is because throughout history, white men are presented as the centre of all great mathematical discoveries. We know that this isn't true yet we celebrate the accomplishments of white men more than any other race or gender in the mathematical field. That's why all of these articles and videos highlight these mathematicians specifically and their achievements, to give younger folk another idea of what a 'mathematician' is or can be. And I think this is a great solution or at leas the beginning steps to correct the public idea of what a mathematician is or looks like. Math doesn't belong to one race or gender - it's universal; as we've seen throughout history, math has been and always will be an accumulation of knowledge that people of all backgrounds has contributed to. So why not highlight a more diverse group of people to demonstrate that?