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International Women's Day: Women in STEM

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Women have always fought.

That's not an original line; it's from the award-winning essay by Kameron Hurley which describes the surprising fact that women have always fought.

Here's a quote from the essay, which I highly recommend reading in full;

"...when we talk about “people” we don’t really mean “men and women.” We mean “people and female people.”  We talk about “American Novelists” and “American Women Novelists.” We talk about “Teenage Coders” and “Lady Teenage Coders.”

And when we talk about war, we talk about soldiers and female soldiers. 

 Because this is the way we talk, when we talk about history and use the word “soldiers” it immediately erases any women doing the fighting. Which is it comes as no surprise that the folks excavating Viking graves didn’t bother to check whether the graves they dug up were male or female. They were graves with swords in them. Swords are for soldiers.  Soldiers are men. 

 It was years before they thought to even check the actual bones of the skeletons, instead of just saying, “Sword means dude!” and realized their mistake. 

Women fought too."

...and to add to that sentiment; women have always learned.  Women have studied, women have taught, women have contributed to science.  Women weren't always given the same opportunities, and they weren't always given the same recognition, but they were there too.  We were there too.  This is going to be a post about some of those women.  For a more detailed post on one of them - specifically Dame Nancy Rothwell - take a look here.

Foz Meadows has a long post of links on this exact subject, a post which is also recommended in Kameron Hurley's essay.  IFL Science has a long list of women in STEM and a video.

Then there's Rejected Princesses, one of my favourite websites which tells the stories of bad-ass women throughout history.  A few examples;


  • Hypatia of Alexandria (Approx. 350-370BCE to 415BCE), the first recorded female mathematician and one of the last scientists to have access to the Library of Alexandria.
  • Mary Anning (1799-1847), a Geologist who found the first full ichthyosaur skeleton.  She was not able to join the Geological society because she was a working-class woman.
  • Zelia Nuttal (1857-1933), an archaeologist who performed the first ever academic study of Aztec Pottery.
  • Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958), who took the first picture of DNA.


Ada Lovelace

You might also want to read about Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, and Hedy Lamarr, the actress who, along with George Anthiel, invented Spread Spectrum Technology.  Spread Spectrum Technology paved the way for the wireless devices we use today.

If you're in Manchester, I highly recommend taking a tour of the John Rylands Library.  The library was built by Enriqueta Rylands after the death of her husband, John.  She was his third wife and she inherited his £2.5million fortune, making her one of the wealthiest women in Britain.  She used that money to build a lavish reference library in an area known as the "murder mile".  The library was open to the general public, because she believed in education.  She was a demanding woman, who had the library built to her exact specifications and had a great deal of fun outbidding offended men for collections of books.  Enriqueta Rylands was the first woman to be given the Key to the City of Manchester.

One bonus link; Noor Inayat Khan, one of my favourite women in history.  She spent five months working as the only radio operator in occupied Paris during WWII, a post that usually only lasted six weeks.

This post by Kali.

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