Over the past 15 years symplectic geometry has developed its own identity, and can now stand alongside traditional Riemannian geometry as a rich and … - Dusa McDuff

The past few years have seen several exciting developments in the field of symplectic geometry, and a beginning has been made towards solving many important and hitherto inaccessible problems. The new techniques which have made this possible have come both from the calculus of variations and from the theory of elliptic partial differential operators. This paper describes some of the results that obtained using elliptic methods, and then shows how applied these elliptic techniques to develop a new approach to , which has important applications in the theory of 3- and 4-manifolds as well as in symplectic geometry.

On two different occasions recently, (male) mathematicians asked me in all innocence: But you surely never suffered any discrimination?

Was I ever discriminated against? There are two kinds of discrimination: explicit and implicit. For the most part, explicit discrimination did not affect me much. However, in retrospect, implicit discrimination—for example, the fact that I was so isolated as a postdoc because I could not share in college life—as well as my own internalized misogyny, did have a significant effect, though I hardly noticed this at the time. Another important factor, and one that I was aware of, was pervasive but not overt: it was very rare that women became professional scientists in Britain at the time, largely because science (and particularly “hard” as opposed to “life” science) was considered such a very unfeminine thing to do. ... These days, when most of the obvious barriers to women’s participation in mathematics have been removed, there still remain very strong and insidious internal barriers, shown in such phenomena as stereotype threat or imposter syndrome. The prejudices that lead to people accepting as completely normal that women should not get degrees at Cambridge (they first could get Cambridge degrees in 1948) are very strong and do not disappear immediately when the external barrier is removed. ...
In the 1960s there were, of course, very visible manifestations of the idea that academic life is not for women. At the time, most Ivy League universities in the States did not admit women, and in Britain almost all the colleges at the most prestigious universities (Oxford and Cambridge) were single sex.