Report from IOWME
The International Organization of Women
and Mathematics Education

Convenor of IOWME: Jo Boaler USA/UK
Newsletter Editors: Megan Clark and Sharleen Forbes, New Zealand

At ICME-9, the International Organisation of Women and Mathematics Education (IOWME) met for four different symposia gatherings at which women and men from 24 countries came together to consider issues of equity and social justice in mathematics education. Presenters from Australia, England, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, India, Japan, Singapore, the USA, Wales, and the West Indies reported upon their research findings. The sessions were extremely well attended, with members from 24 countries joining in with the debates. The symposia, organised by Leone Burton, from the UK, the outgoing convenor of IOWME, provided an extremely important forum for members to consider patterns of mathematics achievement and participation of girls and boys, women and men, and students of different cultural and social class groups across the world. All of the previous IOWME meetings have resulted in a publication and the sessions in Japan will form the basis of book: Which Way Social Justice in Mathematics Education? This will appear in 2003 in the series for which Leone Burton is the series editor, called International Perspectives on Mathematics Education, published by Greenwood.

At the Annual General Meeting, held on August 5, 2000, from 6 pm to 7 pm the outgoing convenor Leone Burton and the outgoing editor of the newsletter, Lesley Jones (both of the UK) were succeeded by myself as convenor and Megan Clark and Sharleen Forbes (both from New Zealand) as joint newsletter editors. Short biographies of Jo Boaler (convenor) and Megan Clark, and Sharleen Forbes (newsletter editors) are given at the end of this report.

Priorities for the group for the next four years continue to be: careful attention to equity, including the under-representation and participation of girls and women; and increasing the participation of members in under-represented countries to the group. The new newsletter editors are welcoming articles written in languages other than English, and they plan to publish two Newsletters a year and circulate it to all the national co-ordinators (representing 42 countries). Thanks to the recent hard work of Leone Burton and Lesley Jones, as well as many others, IOWME is still a flourishing organization within ICMI. We are gradually increasing the membership of previously under-represented countries in the world. Other ideas for the next four years that I have shared with IOWME members through the newsletter are:

• To consider a changed name that reflects our broad concern for equity, beyond issues of gender, such as the international organisation for equity in mathematics education (IOEME).
• To consider the introduction of a constitution, as IOWME currently has a vast number of members. This will give the organisation an official structure within ICMI and help the smooth and fair election of future officials.
• International activities that will allow members from different countries to work on substantive issues together and learn about each other's countries. For example, the national co-ordinator from India has suggested that the newsletter should include a regular problem solving section that invites girls to send in solutions, that we are currently exploring.

Jo Boaler is an associate professor at Stanford University, specializing in mathematics education and co-chair of the Curriculum and Teacher Education area. She is a former secondary school teacher of mathematics and researcher at London University. Jo taught in diverse, inner London comprehensive schools, across the 11-18 age range and was the deputy director of the national consortium for mathematics testing and assessment. She managed a team of people who researched and designed mathematics assessments for all 14 year olds in the UK. Her PhD won the national award for educational research in the UK. She specialises in the impact of different mathematics teaching approaches upon student understanding and achievement, including the relationship between mathematics teaching approaches and equity. She is an elected fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (Great Britain). She is a recent recipient of an "early career award" from the National Science Foundation. Jo is the author of Experiencing School Mathematics: Teaching Styles, Sex and Setting, published by the Open University Press in 1997 that won the "Outstanding Book of the Year" award for education in Britain and, more recently, the editor of Multiple Perspectives on Mathematics Teaching and Learning published by Ablex, 2000. She was an assistant professor at Stanford University from 1998-2000, and is now an associate professor.

Megan Clark is Associate-Professor in the School of Mathematical and Computing Sciences at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and is also the director of the Centre for Mathematics and Science Education there. She taught in a secondary school before joining the university and has three children of her own who are currently at university, in high school and in primary school respectively. Megan was the New Zealand national representative for ICMI from 1991 to 2000 and was a member of the Government Task Force on Mathematics and Science Education and is currently on the reference group for the New Zealand Numeracy Development Project as well as having had an involvement with the Second International Mathematics Study (SIMS). She was a participant in the ICMI Study Group on Gender and Mathematics held in Sweden in 1993. She has also been a reviewer for the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Most recently she was a British Council Visitor to the UK this year. Most of her research has been on participation and performance in mathematics especially with regard to girls but latterly focussing on ways to make the math classroom a more comfortable place for indigenous people and minorities.

Sharleen Forbes is a mother of four children; one teenager and three adults. Her current occupation is as Chief Analyst in her country's official statistics agency, Statistics New Zealand. In the past she has worked as both a secondary school mathematics teacher and a university lecturer in mathematics and statistics. She has a long-standing interest in mathematics education and in the measurement of gender and ethnic differences in mathematics in particular. For a number of years she has been (together with Megan) a member of a small collective of women (EIME - Equity in Mathematics Education) which has carried out several research projects and published reports such as Mathematics for All (Forbes, Blithe, Clark & Robinson 1990) and The Testing of Girls in Mathematics (Blithe, Clark, Forbes & Forbes 1994).