Women in Science - Please

I’m going to continue posting along this line videos of amazing female scientists who are proving that gender is not a qualification for the sciences.

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The amazing Lovelace:

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The opening post contains a segment from the following full, two-hour, ‘Inspiring Future Women in Science’ broadcast.

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Don’t forget Marie Curie:

(Sorry I can’t find any great videos but here’s an article: https://learnodo-newtonic.com/marie-curie-contribution)

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Timeline of women in science - Wikipedia

Less chance we omit anyone. I’m sure even this list is far from exhaustive.

When we think of science, despite its timelessness it still kind of doesn’t show up as a term until around the age of enlightenment and beyond. If I’m not mistaken, Francis Bacon was the first to pen anything about scientific method in the Elizabethan period. However, it is clear that very soon after we evolved into beings who were our ancestors there were already signs of early technology. Astronomy is not new. Architecture is not new. Number is not new. Even in the days of cave dwellers and hunter gathers they were able to fashion tools from rock, wood, sinew, hide, etc. for hunting, preparing food, sewing clothing, etc.

Men cannot take all the credit, or likely even the half of it. Women have been at the forefront of technology from the beginning. We need them in STEM more now than ever.

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With all respect towards women and many of the achievements they have accomplished, you can hardly say that men can take less than 1/2 the credit in scientific achievements. Just by looking at the numbers and the outlook towards women through the centuries they weren’t even allowed to go to college or have more STEM classes till more recent years thus man, in general, was able to have more knowledge in that area for centuries. If you look at the great scientists of old such as Issac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Francis Bacon (as you have mentioned), and Thomas Edison to name a few, they were generally male with only a few exceptions. Now I’m not trying to bash women in any way, but logically when we actually look at the data and history men did have the majority impact on science for millennia. If this is truly “offensive” to you to flag this as “inappropriate” you can nither deal with other opinions or facts of life.

First of all making fun of the term “inappropriate” or marking your “joke” the as facts of life? All how is stating is that we need more woman in stem relate to you talking about how great men are? Just because you make a rant saying how important men are or how they deserve credit too means nothing to the point of which men and woman should be equal. You are right that men did invent a lot of machinery that still doesn’t break the fact that women have done just as much as well . His point is saying that you should respect women just as much as men and that in the end you don’t have to compare.

And yet in recent years we have a huge push to specifically call out women in particular. When I was in school, we learned about all sorts of historically important contributors to science. People like Ada Lovelace or Mary Curie, or G.W. Carver. These and many other names have been around in science and history textbooks for decades now. It wasn’t until around 2015 where the idea of sidelining men came around. Today, we have entire curriculums centered around solely influential women, while at the same time many men from history are being removed from textbooks for a variety of reasons. As a modern young woman, you have over 20,000 gender-specific scholarships to apply for as well as thousands of networking programs, advocacy groups, organizations, and clubs (excluding greek organizations) built exclusively to support and nurture your education and career. Young men have 0 gender-specific scholarships and the only organizations that focus on them specifically are a dwindling number of fraternities.

The idea of a “Women in Tech” course would be to motivate young women & girls to pursue a career in STEM by giving them inspiration and role models to follow. This demographic already has that in droves. Meanwhile, boys growing up in the coming generation have almost no access to similar programs.

If your argument is that men and women need to be respected equally, where is the calling to encourage more boys to get into STEM? Where are the videos of Neil Armstrong or Charles Babbage telling young boys that there is still space for them to discover and leave their mark? There currently isn’t any Codecademy course that celebrates the accomplishments of the most significant computer scientists in history, at best they are mentioned in context-appropriate places throughout many different courses. Does it not seem demotivating to say “women deserve a course dedicated to their accomplishments, but all of them men who made an impact can be relegated to a single sentence somewhere obscure”? Now bring that to a society-wide scale, and you get an idea of what young boys are currently facing.

This isn’t a new argument, the issue of boys being abandoned by the education system has been noted since the mid 1970s, and only started getting mainstream attention around 2015. Even now, 8 years later, the issue is still being sidelined and ignored, and every gender-centric solution to education issues inadvertently makes the problem worse. If you don’t believe me, here are several articles I found that provide more context and links to research showing how things really are:

And most concerning, you get articles like this Vox article that try and use dishonest statistical analysis (like what I called out two years ago in the Codecademy Data Science course which was later revised to remove it) to blame the victim.