In high school, I got the chance to work in a high tech lab. In this lab, I was surrounded by fellow students who encouraged each other unconditionally. For us, the word scientist had no gender. Both young women and men put in equal amounts of work and had the same opportunities.
This was a haven, where our young minds were able to grow and thrive without gender inequalities. Unfortunately, the real world of science is a little different.
According to an article in the New York Times which was published in 2013, "only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women". This begs the question of why? Why are there so few women in science still and what unique challenges do they face?
At Eastern Washington University, Jared Mauldin is an engineering student. He published an article in EWU's Easterner newspaper describing sexism in STEM.
Photo courtesy of The Huffington Post.
This piece by Mauldin brings up some very compelling points. The paragraph about finding true worth in looks is one that many women deal with. As a young woman myself, it is very easy to focus solely on our outsides. Our appearance is what people judge us on most often, and it is what society tells us we should spend time on. There needs to be a movement encouraging us that our brains can be the most beautiful part of us.
One example of sexism in science came to light in June of this year. Nobel Prize winner, Sir Tim Hunt, was quoted with saying "Let me tell you the trouble with girls. You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them, they cry!". Hunt also stated that he was in favor of single sex labs.
This is 2015, and this is a Nobel-Prize winning scientist. His statements are offensive and so beyond sexist. Views from high up men like this are what discourage women from thinking that they can in fact be a scientist, a technician, an engineer, a mathematician, or anything they want to be. These statements also write off all women as purely being around for the sake of attention to or from a male, and portrays women as only being emotional.
My personal favorite response to these statements comes from that same article describing the Hunt statements. A bunch of women in science began tweeting pictures of themselves with #distractinglysexy as a way to use humor to discredit Hunt's remarks.
Ultimately, as a woman in science, you are forced to prove yourself much more than a male scientist does. This is due to the preconceived notions which many people have towards women. I shudder to think that a young girl somewhere right now is thinking that she is supposed to become a princess instead of a doctor because someone has hinted towards males being the more competent sex.
I hope that we as a society realize this problem and work to overcome it. I personally believe that sexism in science will only begin to fade into oblivion once women truly believe that we can hold and excel in STEM positions, even in the face of adversity. To my male counterparts, though, I encourage you to make sure you do not dispel anything your female counterparts say simply because she is a different gender from yours. Especially in STEM fields, this attitude is toxic and follows a woman through her life.
As a closing, here are 5 female scientists, doctors, inventors, mathematicians, etc. who were able to overcome great struggles to do great things. Go change the world, ladies!
1. Marie Curie
Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel prize and the first PERSON to win Nobel prizes in two disciplines. She made great strides in the fields of radioactivity and was the first to isolate polonium and radium.
2. Mary Anning
Anning was a self taught paleontologist. "At age 12 she had found, with her brother, a complete ichthyosaur skeleton, and later made other major discoveries. Louis Agassiz named two fossils for her. Because she was a woman, the Geological Society of London would not permit her to make any presentation about her work."
3. Barbara McClintock
McClintock spent most of her time studying corn cells and genetic expression. Ultimately, she was cited with discovering 'jumping genes', but not until molecular techniques could prove her theory years later. She won a Nobel Prize in 1983.
4. Rosalind Franklin
Most people have heard of Watson and Crick regarding the discovery of the structure of DNA, but Franklin was imperative to the discovery. "As a teenager in the 1930s, Franklin attended one of the few girls’ schools in London that taught physics and chemistry, but when she told her father that she wanted to be a scientist, he rejected the idea. He eventually relented and she enrolled at Cambridge University, receiving a doctorate in physical chemistry. She learned techniques for X-ray crystallography and made X-ray images of DNA. She had nearly figured out the molecule’s structure when Maurice Wilkins showed one of Franklin’s X-ray images to James Watson."
5. Maria Mitchell
Mitchell is the first American woman cited as being a professional astronomer. She saw a blurry line through her telescope, which was a comet. The discovery of comets is her main contribution to science, and she was the first female astronomy professor at a university in the US.
*Biographies from http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/ten-h... and http://womenshistory.about.com/od/airspacesciencem...
