STEM
- Brianna Buller
- Aug 19, 2022
- 15 min read
Updated: Aug 22, 2022
Featuring: Ada Lovelace, Enedina Marques, Hedy Lamarr, Kathrine Johnson, Tu Youyou, Corinne Le Quere, Regina Honu, and Diana Sierra
Women in STEM has always been an important topic for me personally. From ages 14 to 20, I was fulling preparing to be a part of this community. I took all the science and mathematics courses since I intended to become a doctor once I graduated. However, after some self-reflection, I realized that becoming a doctor was not the right move for me. That is how I find myself currently in the humanities but with the majority of my friends still in the STEM field. The statement of there not being enough women in the field is entirely accurate, and everyday women face the backlash from our male counterparts. It gets to be very tiring having to prove oneself every day. However, this is not a phenomenon that only occurs in STEM; still, it is important to note these happenings. This theme aims to inspire younger generations and highlight some women in STEM who are role models. We can look at these women and see the trail they left for us to follow.
Sourcing for this theme mainly consisted of online research as I wanted to do more currently women. I was able to use a few of my books for research that had entries on the women I chose to highlight, those being This is Herstory by Harriet Dyer, 100 Nasty Women of History by Hannah Jewell, and The Little Book of Feminist Saints by Julia Pierpont. There is a lack of reading material that is a comprehensive list of women in STEM from around the world. There are books on women in the UK or US, but nothing to the degree I was trying to research. I chose two women in each STEM branch: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. I did not know about any of these women to the degree that I now know them after creating this theme. There are many women that I could have done, but I chose these women to highlight just how impactful their work has been for society. Some of them are still striving, and some have passed away, leaving us with the fruits of their labor. It is also important to note that there have been women in STEM in some of the other themes, such as Unsilenced and Women of WWII.
*All of the art is of my own creation, and there may be some inaccuracies in the images depicting real-life objects or people. You can think of it as me using my artistic license for the visuals in this project.
#1 Ada Lovelace 1815 - 1852 (Math)
Transcript: Augusta Ada Byron was born in 1815 in Britain and is the daughter of famed poet Lord Byron and Lady Anne Byron. At her mother's insistence, Ada received a full education comprised of math and science, which was very unlikely for aristocratic girls in the mid-1800s. When she was about 17, she met Charles Babbage, a mathematician, and inventor. They became friends and helped Ada to study advanced math at the University of London. Charles, at this time, was working on creating machines that performed mathematical calculations. She was asked to translate an article on Charles' work from french to English, and while she did just that, she also added in her own comments and ideas, making her notes three times longer than the original article. Her portion was published in 1843 in the English science journal. People today see her writing as visionary for her time with this emerging science and call her the first computer programmer. Sadly her work was forgotten about until it was rediscovered in the 1950s and shared with the stem community.
Her image is a nod to her work in mathematics. She is referred to as the mother of computers. She is the first to write computer code; without her, we might not have computers today.
The More You Know: Ada took after her mother with her skills in mathematics. Her father, Lord Byron, called her mother Princess of Parallelograms for her skills in mathematics. Lord Byron is remembered as a leading figure in the romantic movement and as one of the greatest British poets. Additionally, in his private life, he was notorious for his promiscuity. Her mother feared that Ada would take after her father, so she instilled lessons in mathematics and science to curb her father's genes of romantic ideals and moody nature.
Watchlist Recommendation: Calculating Ada: The Countess of Computing by Nat Sharmen, (BBC TV documentary, 2015)
Sources
Book - "The Little Book of Feminist Saints" by Julia Pierpont
Book - "This is Herstory" by Harriet Dyer
Online - "Ada and the First Computer" by Eugene Eric Kim and Betty Alexandra Toole, Scientific American Journal https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/Ada_and_the_First_Computer.pdf
Online - "Ada Lovelace" by Terry MacEwen, HIstoric UK
#2 Enedina Marques 1913 - 1981 (Engineering)
Transcript: Enedina Marques was born in 1913 in Brazil. Her mother worked in the home of General Sobrinho, and he paid for her to attend private school with his own daughter her age. She graduated high school in 1931 and became a teacher. Going further, in 1940, she enrolled in an engineering course and faced discrimination from the white men in the school but pushed through and graduated with a degree in civil engineering, the first black woman to do so in Brazil. Afterwards, she started a new job with the state department of transportation and public works, then transferred to the department of water and electricity. Here she helped to lead the construction of the Capivari-Cachoeira Plant project, which is the largest underground hydroelectric plant in the south of the country. Even with a degree from a respected school, there was a lack of respect for her based on her skin color at work. There's a story from when she was working on the plant that she wore a gun on her waist and would shoot it into the air whenever she felt it necessary to make herself respected by the men. She retired in 1962 and became a civil rights activist focusing on human rights and women's rights.
Her image is a nod to her contribution to the construction work on one of the biggest hydroelectric plants in Brazil. Waterfalls are naturally occurring sources of hydroelectricity. Usually, hydroelectric plants are man-made waterfalls in areas where the potential is there but not happening naturally.
The More You Know: Enedina started her university-level schooling for her degree in engineering in 1940. Brazil abolished slavery five decades earlier, yet the tension between races still existed. On top of that, women in brazil did not gain the right the vote until 1932. So, she was not only pushing boundaries as a black individual but as a black woman who had just acquired rights in society. She is a true trailblazer for women in Brazilian society. Enedina graduated five years later from the Department of Engineering at the Federal University of Paraná, the first woman engineer in Paraná and the first black woman to earn a degree in this area of engineering in Brazil.
Watchlist Recommendation: Hydropower 101 by Student energy (To better understand what hydroelectricity is and how it is created and captured.)
Sources
Online -"Enedina Marques: first black woman to earn an engineering degree" by Marques Travae, Black Brazil Today
Online - "Enedina Alves Marques: A Black Brazilian Hidden Figure" by Sed Miles, The Hub
#3 Hedy Lamarr 1914 - 2000 (Engineering)
Transcript: Hedy Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria, to a well-off Jewish family. It is from her father that she receives a curious mind with them having conversations about the inner workings of different machines. She was discovered at the age of 16 and starred in her first movie role in 1930, but it isn't until 1932 that she gains popularity in Europe. In 1937 she leaves her Nazi-sympathetic husband and moves to London, where she meets Louis Mayor of MGM Studios and moves to America and becomes an instant hit. Though she was regarded as one of the most beautiful in Hollywood, she knew she could offer more to society, and with her new husband's help, she recultivates her genius, innovative mind. She invented many things over the years, but her most important one was during WWII with a system that uses frequency hopping to help navigate torpedoes to hit their target. However, the military rejected her idea, and she refocused her wartime efforts to selling war bonds. Though rejected, her idea is the basis for the different ways of wireless communications today, such as Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. Sadly, She is not recognized for her work in STEM until 1997.
Her image is a nod to her scientific career in technology. It is because of her that we have wireless communications like wifi, Bluetooth, and GPS. I do not know about you, but I cannot imagine a life without them.
The More You Know: Hedy and her friend George Antheil collaborated to invent their radio communication system. This system is the basis for wifi, GPS, and Bluetooth. They eventually entered for a patent, patent number 2,292,387, which was granted in 1941. The Navy turned them down because they did not want to spend resources developing it. However, three years after the patent expired, a company used the basis of her system for their need during the Cuban missile crisis. Neither Lamarr nor Antheil received money since the patent expired; however, subsequent patents referred to the Lamarr-Antheil patent as the basis of their work.
Watchlist Recommendation: Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story by Alexandra Dean (2017)
Sources
Book - "100 Nasty Women of History" by Hannah Jewell
Bok - "This is Herstory" by Harriet Dyer
Online - "Hedy Lamarr" by Colleen Cheslak, National Women's History Museum
Online - "Thank This World War II-Era Film Star for Your Wi-Fi" by Alice George, Smithsonian Magazine
#4 Katherine Johnson 1918 - 2020 (Math)
Transcript: Katherine Johnson was born in West Virginia in 1918. She was somewhat of a genius as a child and started her love for math with her obsession with counting everything in sight. She started high school at the age of ten and enrolled in college in 1933 at the age of 15, graduating in four years with a double major in mathematics and french. In 1952, she started working at the Langley aeronautical laboratory at NACA, NASA's predecessor in the black computing group, where she used her math skills to help the engineers as a human computer. She specialized in developing precise trajectory calculations for space missions, with her calculations being crucial to first getting astronauts into space and then eventually getting man on the moon. She worked for NASA for 30 years, helping with projects like apollo 11 to the space shuttle. Afterwards, in retirement, she spent her time talking with young children to encourage interest in STEM. She received the medal of freedom from President Obama in 2015 for her service to the country and would die at the age of 101 in 2020.
Her image is a nod to her work with NASA. It is because of her written calculations that America was able to get mankind into space successfully.
The More You Know: From 1961 to 1963, Katherine played a pivotal role in the mercury program at NASA. The mercury program operated six flights into space with the mission to understand mankind's abilities in space. The first mission flew in 1961 with the Freedom 7, putting Alan Shepard, the first American, into space. In 1962, John Glenn inside Friendship 7 was the first American to orbit the earth. She was also a part of the team that was responsible for calculations for Apollo 11. This mission is the one with Neil Armstong and Buzz Aldrin being the first two humans to touch the moon's surface. She also worked on projects about mars, the space shuttle, and the Earth Resources Technology Satellite.
Watchlist Recommendation: Hidden Figures by Theodore Melfi (2017)
Sources
Book - "This is Herstory" by Harriet Dyer
Online - "Katherine Johnson," NASA
Online - "Katherine Johnson" by Shirley Malcom, Science Journal
#5 Tu Youyou 1930 - present (Science)
Transcript: Tu Youyou was born 1930 in China. She attended Beijing Medical College, where she studied pharmacology, learning how to classify medicinal plants, extract active ingredients and determine their chemical structures. She graduated in 1955, then started working as a researcher at the Academy of Chinese traditional medicine, where she would work for the rest of her career. During the latter part of the Vietnam war, North Vietnam requested help with their malaria problem. In 1967 the search for a new cure for the disease started in China. In 1969 Tu was appointed head of the project and poured over ancient medical texts. Here is where she found a reference to using wormwood from 400AD. Her team isolated a compound in the wormwood called Artemisinin and had a 100% success rate in her animal and human trials. In 1979 her research was finally translated into English, and it took two decades for the WHO to approve her drug as the first line of defense against malaria. In 2015, she received the noble peace prize in physiology or medicine. She is the first mainland Chinese scientist to have received a noble prize in a scientific category without having a doctorate, medical degree, or training abroad.
Her image is a nod to her breakthrough in using the sweet wormwood plant she from in an ancient Chinese medical text to create the cure for malaria. I call this piece roots and shoots, which is botany terminology for baby plants and their first growth spurt from a seed. I broke out my chemistry training to draw the chemical structure of Artemisinin.
The More You Know: When Tu was 16 years old, she had to take two years off of school because she contracted Tuberculosis. She states that after she recovered, she focused on medicine as her career choice. Her goal was to find cures for diseases that deeply affect the human body to help others going through the trauma of a deadly disease, just as she had earlier. Once she was appointed head of the research team for the cure of malaria, she and her team went to Hainan Island, located in southern China. At this time, the island was experiencing an outbreak of the disease. Tu had two young children by this time and had to leave them in the care of others while researching; it would take three years until she could see them again. In the three years since the project began, over 240,000 compounds had been tested and demand useless. Once the sweet wormwood compound was discovered and a successful medical treatment created, Tu and two of her teammates tested the substance on themselves before going on run trials on 21 patients on Hainan island. All 24 recovered.
Watchlist Recommendation: SciShow: How an Ancient Remedy Became a Modern Cure for Malaria (Youtube Series, 2021)
Sources
Online - "Tu Youyou," The Nobel Prize: Women Who Changed Science
Online - "Youyou Tu: significance of winning the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine" by Wenxiu Liu and Yue Liu, National Library of Medicine
#6 Corinne Le Quéré 1966 - present (Science)
Transcript: Corinne Le Quéré was born in 1966 in Canada and is a French-Canadian scientist who is leading the discussion on climate change and carbon emissions. In 1990 while studying at Princeton, she found her niche of study with the carbon cycle and how the oceans fit into it. Fun fact: parts of her model for this are still used today. In 2007 she made her first big scientific breakthrough when she discovered evidence that human activity affected the carbon cycle and that the cycle was not as stable as previously thought regarding the oceans and their part in helping to regulate co2 emissions. Since, she has spent her career trying to educate the public on climate change and the impact of co2 on the environment. In 2010, she met with the UK prime minister and brought a 100,000-year-old block of ice for a demonstration on co2 emissions in the air. Afterward, when she learned that the ice was to be left to melt and waste away, she took it home with her and used it that night in her gin and tonic. During COVID, when conversations and questions arose about carbon emissions, it was her that answered and dominated headlines with her research about humans and the lowering of emissions levels due to worldwide lockdowns.
Her image is my recreation of her using the 100,000-year-old piece of ice in her gin & tonic in 2010. I really enjoy this story; it is one of the reasons why I chose to highlight her in this series.
The More You Know: In 2021, Corinne placed 53rd on Reuters' list of most influential 1,000 scientists studying climate change and 4th among her female scientists. Over the years, she has faced sexism and discrimination in her fields of study. Yet, she is a force to be reckoned with, refusing to stop speaking up about climate change and trying to get people, especially governments, to see the damage that is happening. There is a huge gap in representation between the genders in STEM. She is a face in STEM that is a role model for young girls. She speaks to groups often and still teaches at a university in Canada. It is common for any women in STEM who find themselves in positions of influence to lend their voice for recruiting more females into the field instead of bragging about their accomplishments.
Watchlist Recommendation: Corinne Le Quéré's TedTalk 'Inside the mind of a climate change scientist' (2018)
Sources
Online - "Corinne Le Quéré: The Rarity" by Maurice Tamman, Reuters
Onilne - "A role model for Women in Climate Science: who is Professor Corinne Le Quéré?" by Olivia Howlett, Cervest
#7 Regina Honu 1983 - present (Technology)
Transcript: Regina Honu was born 1983 in Ghana. She grew up as a highly intelligent and curious child and had big dreams of being an innovator, building her own rocket, but her father told her that was impossible because she was a girl. She instead decided to become a computer scientist. She won a competition and was able to study abroad for a year in Norway at the age of 16. She states that it is this exposure to a completely different culture shaped her into the woman she is today. She returned to Africa to continue her higher education in computer science and started working in the corporate world, where she was met with a lot of discrimination based on gender. She quit her job in 2011 and decided to start her own school, Soronko Academy, the first coding and human-centered design school for children and young adults in west Africa. It started with only training women and girls, helping them to realize their economic potential by giving them skills in technology doing its part in helping to close the gap in tech. Over the years, the Academy has since expanded its services to boys, men, and children with disabilities. The Academy won "Most Impactful Initiative" at the Women in Tech global awards in 2020.
Her image is a nod to her personal interest in closing the gender gap in technology. One of the reasons she quit her job is because of all the discrimination she received from being a woman in a man's world. I wanted to show her goal of setting a foundation for the younger generation of girls to stand upon in Africa. The star is in the location of Ghana, where Regina is from, and where the academy started.
The More You Know: The following is a paragraph from the WorldBank, "Soronko Academy won the Most Impactful Initiative at the Women in Tech Global Awards for 2020. She was awarded the 2018 AFS Active Global Citizen Award for her contributions to global competence education and a winner of the Challenging Norms, Powering Economies initiative by Ashoka, UN Women, and Open Society Foundations for work to challenge gender norms in women’s economic empowerment. She has also been ranked one of the top young 50 CEOs in Ghana and Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) Role Model by the Ministry of Education (MOE) through the Council for Technical and Vocational Education and Training (COTVET). She sits on the board of AFS International."
Watchlist Recommendation: 'How Regina Honu is teaching thousands of girls how to create technology and code' by AfricaX (youtube series, 2020)
Sources
Online - "Regina Honu," World Bank Live https://live.worldbank.org/experts/regina-honu
Online - "Meet Regina Honu, a Ghanaian software developer teaching thousands of girls to code" By Daniel Adeyemi, Techcabal
#8 Diana Sierra N/A - present (Technology)
Transcript: Diana Sierra grew up in rural Colombia on her father's farm. She attended Los Andres University, where she obtained her industrial design degree. She went on to get her MS in sustainability management to better integrate environmental responsibility into her designs and inventions. At the core of her career and ideas is women's empowerment, especially in areas of the world where resources are limited for women to better their lives which she understands on a personal level. She co-founded the company Be Girl in 2014. A company that provides sustainable, reusable feminine products mainly for women in remote areas around Africa, South America, Asia, and the middle east. Limited access to menstrual cycle products is a leading cause for millions of girls from completing their education. The company offers period panties, pads, menstrual cups, and a handheld period tracker. They are dedicated to meeting the needs of more than 250 million girls lacking access to appropriate, high-performance feminine products that are necessary for providing independence and empowerment while being environmentally sustainable.
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