The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 110

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Barbara Keyfitz
you will never get any more money.) But after a while I
began to see the possibility of some minor changes. The
Institute had been quite pro-active in populating some of its
committees (for example the Scientific Advisory Panel) with
a diverse group of mathematicians, including both women
and applied mathematicians, two constituencies about which
I was sensitive. But it had not been as effective in making
sure that women were well represented as participants in its
programs and had not fully realized its mandate, “research
in mathematical sciences,” to include applied mathematics.
Now, a director is not a dictator. After railing about this
in a futile way, I presented the situation to the Institute’s
Board of Directors and was gratified to get their agreement:
yes, we should be more aggressive about including women in
our programs, and yes, initiatives to increase our impact in
applied mathematics would be welcomed by the Board. We
were able to include proactive statements about inclusivity in
our instructions to organizers, and it seemed to pay off, as
participation by women, including more women speakers in
the honorary lecture series, increased. My favourite line from
this initiative came from a Deputy Director. Communicating
with an organizer of a workshop, he wrote, “I see that your
list of participants to invite does not include any women. Can
you explain your reasoning?”
While I was Director, we also started a “Centre for
Mathematical Medicine” with very ambitious goals that we
were unable to fully realize, but the Centre continues as a
framework for future activity in this important area. In the
middle of my term, Fields received additional funding from
the Province. Some of this has been used to expand the
PDF program into a set of more stable, multi-year positions;
another part funded a special program intended to help women
and others who had faced some interruption in their careers for
family or medical reasons to immerse themselves in research