Women in Science: WE LOVE YOU!
On the 11th of February, the world celebrated the Women and Girls in Science Day, and a question from a friend of mine compelled me to write this piece. He asked cynically, “why do we celebrate women in science? Why don’t we celebrate the roles of everyone in science?”.
Not so long ago, women were either disregarded for scientific roles, denied proper recognition, or simply snubbed of their own discoveries in science, for there is a reason behind Virginia Woolf’s famous quote, “Anonymous was a woman”. In 1964, Dorothy Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry for her mapping of the structure of penicillin, yet her winning was announced in local newspapers in outrageous headlines such as “Oxford housewife wins Nobel” and “British woman wins Nobel Prize – £18,750 prize to mother of three,” without the slightest mentioning of the awarded scientist’s name. Unfortunately, Hodgkin suffered the lesser, for there are several female scientists whom we might have never heard of their discoveries at all, simply due to their gender.
Hedy Lamarr, attributed “the most beautiful woman in film”, was also a brilliant inventor, which brought us the technology behind secured Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth. Sadly enough, she has not received any proper recognition or material compensation for her inventions until a recent documentary revealed her splendid contribution to modern day communications .
On the other hand, the mass media has not made it easy for girls and women to envision themselves as female scientists until recently, with a majority of movies and shows mainly portraying male protagonists occupying scientific roles, or having impossible standards for female counterparts. With shows and movies mainly focusing on the sexual appeal of the female scientists’ characters rather than their intelligence, it seemed like girls all over the world could not attain the role models they, so desperately, need to see. Luckily, in the last decade, we can observe an increase in the number of women.
participating in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) community, as well as a rather hopeful representation of female scientists in the movie/ TV industry, as many movies stray away from delivering the stereotypical image of female roles of scientists, delivering us masterpieces such as Hollywood’s blockbuster “Hidden Figures”. With faith that one day the STEM field will rid of the gender gap, we celebrate and honor the 30 percent of women researchers and scientists today, and encourage more to rise that number.
Dear readers, remember when you are asked “why do we celebrate women in science?” Why, we celebrate because we can!
Zahra M. Al-Haddad was majoring in energy engineering at AUIS until 2017, where she transferred her studies to the Hellenic American University (HAEC) in Athens, Greece to study electrical engineering. Ms al-Haddad is currently a junior R&D project manager in a prominent ICT solutions company in the Greek capital while pursuing a Master’s degree in informatics (Business Competing and Big Data Analytics) on HAEC scholarship program.
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- Zahra M. Al-Haddad