We were five European women on the round table, and I happened to be one of them. We decided to try to form a network in Europe similar to the Association for Women in Mathematics and to meet again in Paris, already in December the same year.

The second meeting of European Women in Mathematics took place in 1987 at my university, the Technical University of Denmark, in Copenhagen. We had reports about the situation for women mathematicians in the different countries that were represented. We started with countries in the North and ended by countries in the South. What a difference: the further South the more women in mathematics. There were also more women mathematicians in the East than in the West. I think the diversity came as a big surprise to all of us. No doubt culture, tradition and educational systems have an enormous influence on the number.

Our plane from Madrid was delayed and by the time we arrived the meeting had already started. We sat quietly behind a large circle of chairs that practically occupied the whole room, fascinated by the many women, seemingly of all ages and countries, gathered there. Each one of them was briefly introducing herself in English to the rest, and the basic structure was the same in each presentation - name, country of birth, institution where she was working at the time and mathematical interests. The variety of accents that we heard, the different ideas about what it is to be a professional mathematician hidden in those two or three sentences and the richness of ways of thinking - and, consequently, of doing mathematics - reflected in the different choices of words, were just a little sample of the richness that kept emerging in the following days.

... in 2009, I noticed a poster for the 3rd Nordic European Women in Mathematics Summer School. Intrigued, I signed up and I can honestly say that I have never been to such an amazing event in my (admittedly short) mathematical life. Before attending such an event, I really would not have expected that simply being in a room with so many other women getting on with the business of learning some new mathematics could be such an empowering feeling. Moreover, the whole week was incredibly good fun! It was lovely to be around so many intelligent, motivated and interesting women. It was such a relief to be able to talk openly about gender issues without feeling constrained or encountering hostility.

I first encountered an organised group of women mathematicians when as a graduate student I was invited to a meeting of the Boston Women in Mathematics. It was so warm and pleasant to be sitting tightly packed on the floor in somebody's house, all women involved in mathematics. After that, we set up a little group of the women graduate students at Harvard and I made some close friends. I did not think much more about it until the International Mathematical Congress in 1986 in Berkeley. The Association for Women in Mathematics, which had existed in the US for some years, invited women from different countries to speak in a panel discussion. There were a number of us Europeans there, all belonging to the American organisation. It came to me that we ought to be doing this in Europe. I floated the idea and we decided to try. A small group of us set up a first meeting in Paris. Then we had a meeting in Denmark the following year. The third year, I offered to organise a meeting in Warwick. It was all tremendously exciting. We were making things up "on the hoof" and we had to think ahead. If you did not have a suitable plan of action prepared, the meeting would happen and everyone would go away and it would fizzle out. There was no funding. It was a hand to mouth existence, but it grew. We set ourselves up as a legally constituted organisation before the European Mathematical Society and gradually we tapped into various sources of funding. It is not a big organisation but we hold meetings every couple of years somewhere in Europe. European Women in Mathematics offers the kind of friendships and networking that evolve through working together and making the organisation function - meeting women of all different ages and hearing their stories. I hope that we have been a support to younger women. They see women who have made it. Perhaps one or two have been at a difficult point in their career and we have convinced then to carry on.