Women In Stem

Lauren Donohue

The Problem of Underrepresentation

“More girls are choosing to study STEM subjects in further education and are also outperforming boys in these subjects, they are often not persuaded to continue the STEM route into higher education and into a career. London Economics research in 2013 showed out of the 27% of BTEC learners who went on to study engineering degrees, 38% were men, and only 1.4% women.”
- Claire Shaw, The Guardian

Some Numbers

The number of female nobel
laureates in science,
technology, and medicine.

The percentage of stem
jobs that are held by
women.

17.6

The percentage of female full
professors in the
sciences

Marie Curie

In 2005, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard University, speculated that women’s lack of visibility in STEM was due to some lesser aptitude.

The president of Princeton, Shirley M. Tilghman, a molecular biologist; the president of Stanford University, John Hennessey, a computer scientist; and the president of MIT, Susan Hockfield, a neuroscientist, responded in an essay:

"The question we must ask as a society is not 'Can women excel in math, science, and engineering?' -- Marie Curie exploded that myth a century ago -- but 'How can we encourage more women with exceptional abilities to pursue careers in these fields?' "

How Can We Address This?

A Few Proposals

-Better support for women during schooling
-Visible role-models
-Maternity and paternity leave policies that don’t hurt working parents

Sally Ride

"I never went into physics or the astronaut corps to become a role model. But after my first flight, it became clear to me that I was one. And I began to understand the importance of that to people. Young girls need to see role models in whatever careers they may choose, just so they can picture themselves doing those jobs someday. You can’t be what you can’t see."

Visibility

One of the easiest things to address is to call attention to existing role models who do exist and who have often been overwritten. If I ask you to name a female scientist, how many can you come up with? Now if I asked you to name some male scientists, how many do you know? Einstein, Watson and Crick, and Oppenheimer are household names. But it was Rosalind Franklin who first realized the structure of DNA was a double helix, for which Watson and Crick got the credit.

It’s important to teach children and teenagers about the history of women in science. For girls and women specifically, it’s important that they know they have role models. I wanted to create a web-based interactive education tool that middle-schoolers could go through and see that there is a huge legacy of women scientists.

Just a few examples of women who made extraordinary contributions

Florence Bascom, Geologist

Alice T. Ball, Chemist

Annie Easley, Computer Scientist

Maria Goeppert Mayer, Theoretical Physicist

Dorothy Hodgkin, Chemist

Tu Youyou, Pharmaceutical Chemist

Rachel Carson, Marine Biologist

Envisioning an interactive design solution...

I began brainstorming what this interactive tool might look like. I thought of the fundamental contributions that women have lent to science and the way that these contributions live on, even as the women are ignored, like some smoothly working but invisible system. I was struck by the idea that I could create an interactive online periodic table, but rather than chemical elements, each square would represent a woman.

Building A Periodic Table

I sourced famous female scientists across a variety of disciplines: chemistry, computer science, biology, physics, genetics, paleontology, math, earth science, medicine, and astronomy until I had enough to cover every element. The list does disproportionately feature white westerners, revealing that there’s another gap on what information is available on POC women scientists.

Creating Visible Elements

I built the periodic table using javascript, using a json of the periodic table to base the structure around. Scientists were organized by discipline and given chemical element abbreviations based on their initials. When an element is hovered over, the scientist’s image and some information a is displayed.

Check It Out

Feedback

One of the issues that was raised by the creation of the periodic table was that it was a chemistry diagram that represented more than just chemists and the inevitable confusion that that caused. I decided to find 118 female chemists and use them in the periodic table and then expand to other scientific forms for the various other scientific realms, like star charts for the astronomer, a phylogenetic tree for the biologists, An anatomy diagram for the medical researchers and so on.

Starting with astronomers...

I was inspired by original star charts drew out the constellations and often drew out the shapes that the constellations were named after—cygna depicted as a swan or gemini drawn as a set of twins—overlaid over the constellation, I thought like the periodic table, this posed an interesting idea, one that would be at least partially familiar to middle schoolers with some years of science education, but also a new and unique way of visioning these historical figures.

Inspiration

I picked six astronomers to start and decided to draw them as individual constellations on a star chart. Using photoshop, I illustrated a star chart of my own. I chose the astronomers Vera Rubin, Annie Jump Canon, Margaret Burbidge, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Carolina Herschel, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt to start with. Their careers spanned all the way back to the 1800s.

Planned Interaction

Constellations would be fully clickable. When users click them, each constellation reveals the outline of the astronomer. More than one can be clicked at a time. Clicking again provides some information. Take a look at the demo below.

Space Pioneers from Lauren Donohue on Vimeo.

What's next?

Why stop there? There are possibilities for an entire series of interactive science diagrams to be reinterpreted to display female accomplishments.