Since 2017 Dr Jess Wade has made it her one-person mission to encourage more women into science, technology, engineering and math (STEM subjects), by campaigning tirelessly to raise the profile of female scientists and scientists of colour. This started when she discovered one day by chance an absence of women on Wikipedia, in particular one woman climatologist, Kim Cobb, who despite having many scientific articles published on her subject was absent.
Jess then looked at Wikipedia for other notable women scientists she knew and saw their profiles were missing too. Wikipedia has become the world’s encyclopedia, the place to go for information about individuals, ideas and topics and reaches an audience of over two billion people a month. Yet there were so few women represented who worked in science and technology. She then decided to write her own pages on women in science for to the knowledge platform and in the last five years she has composed and contributed over two thousand entries.
The gap between the genders in all echelons of the science world is stark. This year Anne L’Huillier, at the University of Lund, became only the fifth woman to have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics since 1901. In the press conference after the ceremony, she was quoted as saying: “As you know there are not so many women that get this prize, so it is very, very special”. The prize was for her work on “experimental methods that generate autosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter”.
Lower down the ranks of academia the situation is similar: Girls are far less likely to study STEM subjects than boys at A levels even though at an undergraduate level they outperform their male peers. Jess Wade is addressing these inequalities too by spending her free time from her day job as a lecturer in material science specialising in nanotechnology, to speak to girls in schools about science careers, she coordinates conferences to discuss gender inequalities in science and is a leading member of the 500 Women Scientists group. Through her actions, she is hoping to change the culture in science whereby, for various reasons, women are overlooked for scientific grants, not selected for senior faculty positions and are not promoted to their deserved levels of academic ability. These handicaps are present even though the women are just as brilliant as their male counterparts. Jess is brilliant too in her efforts to change the world’s perceptions of women in science.
Her efforts are catching on as well. There is a group of editors worldwide of both genders who have set up the Women in Red (WiR) group that hopes to reduce the systematic gender bias in favour of men on the Wikipedia site. Their task is enormous: as of November, this year on Wikipedia 1,971,671 biographies are of men, while 388,195 are about women!
There is still a long way to go before women and men are treated equally in terms of respect and recognition in the world of science and technology. Maybe we should be telling this to men, rather than women.
What are your own experiences as a woman working in science and technology? Please tell us. We would like to know.
Comments