WoMen In Science
Despite growing up as a self-described outcast, Maria Klawe pursed her passion for technology and became a prominent computer scientist. Klawe is now the first female president of Harvey Mudd College and works hard to ignite passion about STEM fields amongst diverse groups. During her tenure at Harvey Mudd College, her work has helped support the Computer Science faculty's ability to innovate, and has raised the percentage of women majoring in computer science from less than 15 percent to more than 40 percent today.
WoMen in Science
On June 18, 1983, Sally Ride transformed history when she became the first American woman to fly into space. After her second shuttle flight, Ride decided to retire from NASA and pursue her passion for education by inspiring young people. As a result, she founded Sally Ride Science, an organization dedicated to supporting students interested in STEM. Ride passed away in 2012, but her work continues to inspire young women across the country.
As part of a secret World War Two project, six young women programmed the first all-electronic programmable computer. When the project was eventually introduced to the public in 1946, the women were never introduced or credited for their hard work -- both because computer science was not well understood as an emerging field, and because the public's focus was on the machine itself. Since then, the ENIAC Programmers Project has worked hard to preserve and tell the stories of these six women.
Numerous studies have found that women in STEM fields publish less, are paid less for their research and do not progress as far as men in their careers. However, there is very little data at the international or even country level showing the extent of these disparities. Through SAGA, the UIS has been working with partners in countries and regional organizations, to develop a toolkit that includes methodologies, indicators and frameworks to produce more precise data and make better use of existing information.
For example, a survey has been developed that investigates the drivers and barriers to a career in science and engineering. By comparing responses for men and women, the results will show the extent to which family decisions, financial considerations, workplace cultures and discrimination can shape their respective careers in STEM fields.
History is full of women who made enormous contributions to science. Some of them are rightfully well-known, like Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace and Rosalind Franklin. But others, like fossil hunter Mary Anning and NASA pioneer Katherine Johnson, aren't such household names.
She is still the only British woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in any of the three sciences it recognises. In 1965, Dorothy was the second woman, after Florence Nightingale, to be appointed to the Order of Merit by a British monarch. - JC
But opposition in the medical profession also became more entrenched and, for two years, the women were excluded from the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Then in January 1872, the University Court decided that even if the women completed the course and successfully passed all the examinations, they could not be granted medical degrees.
When the school opened on 12 October 1874 it had fourteen students on its roll, including the Edinburgh women. But it took the support of members of parliament to champion a private member's bill, that passed on 11 August 1876, to enable women to qualify in medicine to overcome the resistance they continued to encounter.
In the 1880s, Jex-Blake practised medicine privately in Edinburgh, founding the Edinburgh Hospital and Dispensary for Women and Children and, in 1886, the Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women. In 1894, the University of Edinburgh admitted women to graduate in medicine.
Johnson and other black women initially worked in a racially segregated computing unit in Hampton, Virginia, that was not officially dissolved until NACA became NASA in 1958. Signs had dictated which toilets the women could use.
The youngest of the group, she had been a flight instructor at Fort Sill military base in Oklahoma when she discovered that a privately funded programme wanted to see if women also had the right stuff for space.
By the 1930s Lise Meitner was special, not only because she was one of the few women allowed to work in science, but she was also the foremost nuclear scientist in Germany. But she was also of Jewish descent, and when the Nazis rose to power in 1938 she was forced to flee the country.
Having been inspired by successful women such as Elizabeth Blackwell, the first female doctor in the US, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson opted to contradict the submissive life she was expected to lead and become a doctor. Denied entry to any medical school, despite her respectable education, she was forced to study nursing alongside male peers whose objections led to her dismissal.
Even once she had retired from medicine, Dr Anderson was still grinding down the patriarchy, becoming the first female mayor in England. She was influential to the suffragette movement and inspired her daughter, alongside many other intrepid women, to follow in her esteemed footsteps and strive towards gender equality.
Her legacy remains in that modern-day computing is now commonplace and through the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference, which supports and commends women in the world of computing.
After her return to Earth she continued to inspire future generations as a high-ranking member of the government, representing Soviet women in numerous positions on the global stage. But it is still space that inspires her, still wishing to fly to Mars, even if it is a one-way trip.
Born in 1892 in Seattle, Washington, Ball excelled in science, graduating with top grades from high school in 1910. She earned two degrees at the University of Washington, the first in pharmaceutical chemistry and the second in pharmacy.
In the late 80s, she joined other minority female scientists at a conference to address the challenges faced by minorities in STEM disciplines. In 1988, two years after retiring, she established a scholarship fund for African American science students at Queens College.
Filipa França de Barros completed a PhD in Neuroscience from Université Paris Cité (Paris, France) in 2020. Since 2021, Filipa is a postdoctoral fellow in the Neural Circuits Dysfunction lab at the Champalimaud Foundation (Lisbon, Portugal). Her current research seeks to understand the pathophysiological mechanisms of dystonia, a rare and debilitating movement disorder. By utilizing state-of-the-art behavioral, genetic and physiology techniques in a mouse model of dystonia, Filipa aims at unraveling the alterations in neurons and brain pathways to help improve the currently available scarce and invasive therapeutic options. The GWIS fellowship will enable to determine the role of the cerebello-thalamo-striatal pathway in dystonia, providing valuable insights to cerebellum-based treatments.
The WiSE program is a groundbreaking effort to increase the representation and success of women in science and engineering at USC through a series of creative programs that enable women to thrive at every stage of their careers.
Committed to developing fresh approaches to policies and to building a supportive environment for both women and men, the WiSE program is driving USC to the leading edge of diversity in science and engineering.
The WISP Learning & Engagement page is home to training modules, software tutorials, library guides, and a host of other resources for female scholars exploring the sciences. Self-enroll for full access to this platform!
The presence of women in science spans the earliest times of the history of science wherein they have made significant contributions. Historians with an interest in gender and science have researched the scientific endeavors and accomplishments of women, the barriers they have faced, and the strategies implemented to have their work peer-reviewed and accepted in major scientific journals and other publications. The historical, critical, and sociological study of these issues has become an academic discipline in its own right.
The involvement of women in medicine occurred in several early western civilizations, and the study of natural philosophy in ancient Greece was open to women. Women contributed to the proto-science of alchemy in the first or second centuries C.E. During the Middle Ages, religious convents were an important place of education for women, and some of these communities provided opportunities for women to contribute to scholarly research. The 11th century saw the emergence of the first universities; women were, for the most part, excluded from university education.[1] Outside academia, botany was the science that benefitted most from contributions of women in early modern times.[2] The attitude toward educating women in medical fields appears to have been more liberal in Italy than in other places. The first known woman to earn a university chair in a scientific field of studies was eighteenth-century Italian scientist Laura Bassi.
Gender roles were largely deterministic in the eighteenth century and women made substantial advances in science. During the nineteenth century, women were excluded from most formal scientific education, but they began to be admitted into learned societies during this period. In the later nineteenth century, the rise of the women's college provided jobs for women scientists and opportunities for education.
Born in Warsaw, Poland, Marie Curie, paved the way for scientists to study radioactive decay and discovered the elements radium and polonium.[3] Working as a physicist and chemist, she conducted pioneering research on radioactive decay and was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics and became the first person to receive a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Sixty women have been awarded the Nobel Prize between 1901 and 2022. Twenty-four women have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine.[4] 041b061a72