Category: Women in Science

Oceanography and the Continents

Marie Tharp (30 July, 1920 – 23 August, 2006) was an oceanographer and cartographer who mapped the oceans of the world. She worked with Bruce Heezen, who collected data on a ship, mapping the ocean floor.

Tharp and Heezen

Tharp turned the data into detailed maps. At that time women were not allowed to work on research ships, as it was thought that they would bring bad luck! However, Tharp was a skilled cartographer, and as she made her maps of the floor of the oceans of the world, with their ridges and valleys, she realised that there were deep valleys which showed the boundaries of continental plates. She noticed that these valleys were also places with lots of earthquakes and she became convinced of the basics of plate tectonics and continental drift.

Between 1959 and 1963, Tharp was not mentioned in any of the scientific papers published by Heezen, and he dismissed her theories disparagingly as “girl talk”. As this video  from National Geographic shows, she stuck to her guns and was vindicated by the evidence, eventually managing to persuade Heezen, and the scientific community at large, of the validity of the theories. In 1977, Heezen and Tharp published a map of the entire ocean floor. Tharp obtained degrees in English, Music, Geology and Mathematics during the course of her life. In 2001, a few weeks before her 81st birthday, Marie Tharp was awarded the Lamont-Doherty Heritage Award at Columbia University, in the USA, as a pioneer of oceanography. She died of cancer in 2006.

The National Geographic video provides an excellent testimony to this woman pioneer in oceanography.

Mildred Dresselhaus, the Queen of Carbon | NY Times

“Dr. Dresselhaus, who helped transform carbon into the superstar of modern materials science, was renowned for her efforts to promote the cause of women in science.”

Millie Dresselhaus (nee Spiewak) high school yearbook 1948
1948 A tribute at Hunter High School.

“Mildred (Millie) Dresselhaus, a professor emerita at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology whose research into the fundamental properties of carbon helped transform it into the superstar of modern materials science and the nanotechnology industry, died on Monday in Cambridge, Mass. She was 86.”

Read more.

Credit for the Work

In our research for OpenSTEM material we often find (or rediscover) that the “famous” person we all know is not the person who actually first did whatever it was. This applies to inventors, scientists, explorers.

Marco Polo was not the first to go East and hang out with the heirs of Genghis Khan, Magellan did not actually circumnavigate the world (he died on the way, in the Philippines), and so on.

In the field of science this has also happened quite often and it’s quite frustrating (to put it mildly). It’s important that the people who do the work credit the credit – and particularly not other people claiming (or otherwise getting, such as through a Nobel prize) that work as their own. That’s distinctly uncool.

Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin

Rosalind Franklin was an accomplished British chemist and X-ray crystallographer. It was her work that first showed the double-helix form of DNA. Watson & Crick (with Wilkins) ran with it (without her permission even) and they only mentioned her name in a footnote. As we all know, Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel prize for “discovering DNA”. False history.

X-ray diffraction image of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule
X-ray diffraction image of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule, taken 1952 by Raymond Gosling, commonly referred to as “Photo 51”, during work by Rosalind Franklin on the structure of DNA
(Raymond Gosling/King’s College London)

While it’s not exclusively women who get a bad deal here, there are a fair number, and the research shows that this is often as a result of some very arrogant other people in their surroundings who grab and run with the work. Sexism and chauvinism have played a big role there.

An article by Katherine Handcock at A Mighty Girl provides a short bio of 15 Women Scientists – many of which you may never have heard of, but all of which did critical work. She writes:

For centuries, women have made important contributions to the sciences, but in many cases, it took far too long for their discoveries to be recognized — if they were acknowledged at all. And too often, books and academic courses that explore the history of science neglect the remarkable, ground breaking women who changed the world. In fact, it’s a rare person, child or adult, who can name more than two or three female scientists from history — and, even in those instances, the same few names are usually mentioned time and again.

Read the full article at A Might Girl: Those Who Dared To Discover: 15 Women Scientists You Should Know

People of ENIAC: early digital computer programmers

http://www.phillyvoice.com/70-years-ago-six-philly-women-eniac-digital-computer-programmers/

Without any real training, they learned what it took to make ENIAC work – and made it a humming success. Their contributions were overlooked for decades.

ENIAC, one of the world’s early digital computers (Colossus in the UK was earlier, for example), unveiled 70 years ago Sunday at the University of Pennsylvania, had six primary programmers: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman. They were initially called “operators.”

In this video, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli talks about her time in the 1940’s learning about the ENIAC. She was one of a group of 6 women who were recruited to program this electronic computer.

Please note that the referenced article’s title incorrectly declares ENIAC to be the world’s first electronic computer. This is historically incorrect, with Colossus at Bletchley Park in the UK used for code breaking during WWII, and Konrad Zuse’s Z2 / Z3 in Germany.

Girls in Maths and Science

In a piece on a new OECD study in The Guardian it is noted that

school performance could be boosted by parents encouraging girls to consider careers involving subjects such as engineering

and quoting the report directly:

“Gender disparities in performance do not stem from innate differences in aptitude, but rather from students’ attitudes towards learning and their behaviour in school, from how they choose to spend their leisure time, and from the confidence they have,” the report said.

That quote gets, I think, closer to what’s actually going on. It also identifies that girls actually score higher on maths and science, yet fewer continue with it in the senior high school years, and study a STEM subject in university.

Indeed, parents and schools have an important role to play. From my own observations, lots of kids have an interest and potential for STEM topics, and the key is to enable and feed that interest and not sabotage it with unfortunate stereotyped remarks and many other unhelpful little things (that affect confidence).

You get the odd argument that maths & science are not cool. Well, kids these days play with all the cool technology, right? There’s the Internet, online games, tablets, and so on – and 3D printing, robotics, and much more. It would be rather odd to say that those things are cool, but the people who research and develop these things are not…

I think the issue with that originates with an idea that exists in some schools that it’s (for instance) science vs sports, and that does help us in exploring as to what’s going on there. With sport, you can see very directly what benefit kids get out of it, what they learn is directly applied and visible.

Often, STEM subjects are taught in a dry fashion, and kids indeed wonder what use it is learning all that stuff. We do appreciate that it’s a challenge for teachers to deliver an interesting program (let alone hands-on) program if the resources aren’t there to support it. This is of course even more problematic for kinaesthetic learners.

This is why we develop materials and programs for STEM subjects. With the use intrinsic to the process, kids want to explore more! Girls as well as boys.