History might give you the impression astronomical discoveries were only done by men. But women were participating in scientific expeditions of eclipses too, even though it wasn’t easy.
A new book explores a paradox: women have been excluded from Australian science for many social and political reasons, but were also present and active in it from its earliest days.
Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, was more than just another mathematician.
Watercolor portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace by Alfred Edward Chalon via Wikimedia
Lovelace was a prodigious math talent who learned from the giants of her time, but her linguistic and creative abilities were also important in her invention of computer programming.
Women in Antarctica experience significant barriers of sexism, prejudice and abuse.
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By surveying over 100 people in academic medicine, a researcher found that women are consistently excluded from important networking activities like watching sports, drinking at bars and playing golf.
Tu Youyou shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015.
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The proportion of women in a discipline influences how rigorous and trustworthy people rate the field overall, as well as whether they categorize a STEM field as a ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ science.
Working from home comes with many distractions.
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We spoke to 332 Year 3 students about what they want to be when they grow up. Some responses raised alarms.
Mary Elizabeth Shutler in Vanuatu, in the1960s. Permitted to join the first archaeological expedition to New Caledonia in 1952 as a ‘voluntary assistant’, she was the only French speaker and chief interlocuter with the Kanak people.
Family archives, reproduced with the kind authorisation of John Shutler & Susan Arter.
‘Wives’, volunteers, assistants: the vital contribution of women archaeologists has long been underplayed, if not erased. A new project uncovers trailblazers in the Pacific.
Science fields are improving at being more inclusive. But explicit and implicit barriers still hold women back from advancing in the same numbers as men to the upper reaches of STEM academia.
Excluding, silencing and discouraging so many brilliant minds carries a very heavy cost, not just to the women directly impacted, but to all of humanity.
Glenn, in the NASA mailroom, received letters from fans of all ages.
John Glenn Archives, The Ohio State University
John Glenn would have turned 100 on July 18, 2021. Today’s space program is a giant leap more inclusive than when he made his pioneering orbit of the Earth in 1962.
One criticism of traditional mentoring is that it teaches people how to succeed by playing by existing rules, thus reinforcing the status quo. But mentoring can also be a force for change.
Professor Tania Douglas is warmly remembered as an excellent scientist and a remarkable human being.
Je'nine May/UCT Health Sciences
She believed and advocated that Africa needs to find solutions to its own problems and worked tirelessly to build biomedical engineering capacity across the continent.
Shakuntala Haraksingh Thilsted, a native of Trinidad and Tobago, is the winner of the 2021 World Food Prize for her work identifying small fish as valuable nutrition sources for developing countries.
When women do science, society benefits in myriad ways.
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