STEM Club for girls!

 We at Sci/Why have heard from a STEM Club for girl with great news!

Their organizer Skye sent a note to one of our wranglers, Adrienne, telling us the following:

I work with a STEM Club for girls and we just wanted to reach out to let you know that your Sci/Why website was such a help to us! The girls came across it while they were doing research for a project, and the resources you've put together led us to tons of information... we thought you'd appreciate hearing how much you helped us :)!

I was also very impressed with the other resources the girls found in their research! They wanted to share one with you, as a way of saying thanks! Here's a guide to scholarships they picked out: www.madisontrust.com/client-resources/articles/scholarships-for-women-in-stem/

We had the idea that we could include this with our thank-you note to return the favor! They thought it would be a good link for you to add to your science links page sci-why.blogspot.com/p/science-links.html . Hopefully it's helpful !

If you're able to add it we have our next STEM Night next Wednesday, and they would be so proud to see their suggestion :)

~Skye Olley

Thanks for your encouraging words and the helpful link. We will share it with our list. 💗

We are thrilled to hear about the enthusiasm and resourcefulness of everyone in your STEM Club! It's a great thing to share a passion for curiosity.

All the best to Skye and the STEM Club for girls. Here's hoping to hear from many more STEM Clubs for kids and teens and more!

 

Alice E. Wilson: A Pioneer in Geology

By Claire Eamer

Several years ago, I wrote a book about pioneers in science and technology and how they were treated. It is called Before the World Was Ready: Stories of Daring Genius in Science (Annick Press, 2013). A couple of days ago, I had one of those awful authorly moments where you shout (internally, at least), "NO!!! I missed that!!!"

What I missed, or rather who I missed, was Alice E. Wilson, the first woman geologist in the Geological Survey of Canada. I'd never heard of her. And I should have. In fact, all Canadians should hear about her. And she should definitely have been in my book.

In Alice Wilson's case, the world at the beginning of the twentieth century -- most particularly, the Geological Survey of Canada -- was not ready for a woman to be a geologist. Wilson worked for the Geological Survey for 37 years, but only late in her career did she get the recognition (and pay) that would have come automatically to a man many years earlier.

Alice Evelyn Wilson was born in Cobourg, Ontario, in 1881, the daughter of a university professor. She and her two brothers spent much of their childhood hiking, camping, canoeing, and exploring the outdoors. They collected fossils and interesting minerals from the limestone formations around Cobourg, sparking in Alice a lifelong fascination with fossils.

When it came time to go to university, however, Alice chose to study modern languages. She explained later that at that time -- 1901 -- it was acceptable for a young woman to become a teacher, but not a scientist. Just a few classes short of her degree, however, Alice's health broke down, and she had to drop out of university for a long convalescence. 

Dr. Alice E. Wilson

When she recovered, she found a job at the Museum of Mineralogy in Toronto and rediscovered her childhood passion for rocks and fossils. In late 1909, she managed to get a temporary position with the palaeontology section of the Geological Survey of Canada, helping catalogue, organize and label the division's invertebrate fossil collection.

Alice's boss took a liking to her and helped her get a leave of absence to finish her degree. When she returned in 1911, it was as a permanent (if very junior) staff member. She stayed with the Survey until her compulsory retirement in 1946 at the age of 65. It reportedly took five employees to cover all the work she had been doing.

Even after retirement, she kept an office at the Geological Survey and continued her research until a few months before her death in 1964. She also taught palaeontology at Carleton University in Ottawa, led field trips, and wrote scientific papers and books, including an introduction to geology for children, The Earth Beneath Our Feet (Macmillan, 1947).

During all that long career, Alice Wilson faced an ongoing struggle against the limitations placed on her as a woman. And she constantly found ways around those limitations. 

She wasn't allowed to do remote fieldwork as that would mean travelling and living with men. (Scandalous!). So she conducted research in her own backyard, the St. Lawrence Valley, on foot and by bicycle, when the Survey wouldn't provide her with a car as they did for male geologists, and later in a car she bought herself. (A colleague said she was a terrifying driver, constantly talking and even turning around to address passengers in the back seat.)

Dr. Wilson waxing enthusiastic!

She applied for leave to pursue a doctoral degree -- a slam-dunk for a male employee -- but was turned down. Repeatedly. Still, every year she applied. Finally, in 1926, the Federation of University Women took up the struggle and embarrassed the Geological Survey into granting her leave. She received her doctorate in 1929.

The promotion that should have happened automatically when she earned her doctorate actually came seven years later when the Geological Survey discovered that their lowly female employee was receiving international recognition, including appointment as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) and election as a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. Two years later came another first: Alice Wilson was the first woman elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

When asked in an interview how she coped with the resistance she met as a woman in science, she said: "If you meet a stone wall you don't pit yourself against it, you go around it and find a weakness." Dr. Alice Wilson found enough weaknesses in the various stone walls she encountered to achieve plenty of recognition in her own lifetime and after: an honorary doctorate from Carleton University; a photostory about her from the National Film Board; articles in major newspapers; and, in 1959, the Geological Survey held a reception to recognize her 50 years in geology, presenting her with bookends and a paper weight made from marble quarried in a marble deposit she had herself discovered.

Since her death, the honours continue. A meeting room at the Geological Survey's headquarters was named Alice Wilson Hall. In 2018, a plaque honouring her was installed in the Canadian Museum of Nature. And the Canadian Federation of University Women manages the annual Dr. Alice E. Wilson Awards, given to women pursuing graduate studies in the sciences.

And I really REALLY wish she were in my book!

Sources:

Alice Evelyn Wilson (1881-1964), on the website of the Chair for Women in Science and Engineering

Ricard, Alicen. Women's History Month: Dr. Alice Wilson, on the website of Westcoast Women in Engineering,Science and Technology, October 1, 2018.

Sarjeant, William A. S. Alice Wilson, first woman geologist with the Geological Survey of Canada, in Earth Sciences History, v. 12, no. 2, 1993, p. 122-128.

Sinclair, G. W. Memorial to Alice E. Wilson (1881-1964), in Bulletin of the Geological Society of America 77 (1966), p. 215-218.

Soldati, Arianna, and Cassie Freund. Meet Alice Wilson, the Canadian geologist who did the work of five people, on the website Massive Science, Feb. 27, 2020. 

Note: Photos retrieved from NRCan and used under the Open Government Licence -- Canada: https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada

 

An Iceberg of Women in Science

Grace Lockhart was the first woman in the whole British Empire to graduate from a university. It was 1874 when she got a science degree up at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick, Canada, but it was almost another 50 years before all women got the right to graduate or even to attend classes in Canada (and the UK). Nicaragua started allowing women in university about 100 years before that and Italy started about 700 years earlier. Once women could graduate, they still usually didn’t get credit for their discoveries and inventions. But that didn’t stop some of the brightest female minds from contributing to human knowledge and technology.

We hear little bits now, often in form of stories about the wives who innovated beside their husbands, brothers, and employers, did the field work, catalogued all the specimens, built the telescopes, designed the experiments, or crunched the data. The information is coming out now. Slowly.

Blockbuster films like Hidden Figures, memes that give credit where it is due, and announcements of “all female firsts” like the space walk this month led by Kristen Facciol,

a female flight controller from the Canadian Space Agency give us the sense that there is a whole iceberg of information waiting to be revealed about female scientists throughout history.

scientist: "does everyone here know what Watson and Crick discovered?"
me from back of room: "Rosalind Franklin's notes"

— Robby Kraft (@RobbyKraft) May 3, 2016

My high school science teacher 30 years ago taught me about Madame Curie’s experiments with radiation, but that was the only thing I’d ever heard about a woman doing science. It’s getting easier to learn more about women doing science throughout history: buy books about them; watch movies about them; ask questions about them at the science centre; ask teachers about them. The more interest we show, the more answers will get shared.

Search this blog for “women” and you’ll find several posts. A Mighty Girl regularly posts stories and cool posters about female scientists and inventors and all kinds of other interesting women, both old and current. Brain Pickings has great stories about women in science, as does scientificwomen.net, and you’ll find great summaries on YouTube, too. Take a look around, then tell others the cool things you learned.

---

by Adrienne Montgomerie
photo from Pixabay

International Day of Women in Science!

A quick post on a Monday instead of our usual Friday, but it IS International Day of Women and Girls in Science. That's well worth celebrating! There's a whole event page on Twitter about it, as well as a hashtag. What are your science websites saying about the women scientists on staff?

Hakai Institute, here on Canada's west coast, posted on Twitter some lovely photos of women researchers in the field, with instruments, marine life, and technology. Check out their website for photos and articles of marine biology researchers doing what they do best.

The Allan J. Carswell Observatory, with York University in Toronto, also posted on Twitter profiles of four of their young bachelor's degree students, describing their current research projects.
Learn about their public star viewings and other events on their website.

If you're looking for some amazing posters of science role models, go to Nevertheless podcast website. They commissioned art with images of eight international women working in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math).

Lego Launches Women into Space Play!

Post by Helaine Becker

Count down to equal opportunity, on this planet and beyond. Lego has introduced a new set of figures that celebrate female space pioneers.

They include Katherine Johnson (the subject of the Hollywood blockbuster, Hidden Figures, and my own upcoming picture book, Counting on Katherine), Mae Jemison, Sally Ride, Nancy Grace Roman and Margaret Hamilton.

It's five small steps for womankind, and a giant leap for all!

Katherine Johnson calculated trajectories to the
moon and back for the Apollo program

Margaret Hamilton wrote the in flight software for Apollo,
and was a pioneer in computer science.

Proof That Even Brilliant Scientists Are Occasionally Boneheads

By L. E. Carmichael

Hey, scientists are people, too. They're just as vulnerable to bias and brain farts as the next guy or gal. But sometimes the boneheadery is so profound you really kind of wonder how they manage to tie their shoes in the morning.

Case in point, Tim Hunt. 

Tim Hunt is a Nobel Prize winning biochemist. Who proclaimed to a room full of female science journalists that science labs should be segregated because:

Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.

Let's put this statement under the... ahem... microscope, shall we? 

You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you...

As regular readers will know, before I started writing science books for kids, I was an actual female scientist. And I vividly remember those days in the lab, wearing a lab coat flecked with stains of mysterious origin, the aroma of growth medium and carcinogenic chemicals infusing the air, staring at data in the wee hours of the night, trying to figure out why a reaction that had worked perfectly well the last three hundred times had mysteriously stopped working... Such a heady combination for romance, it's a wonder I managed to get any work done. 

But putting all that aside, I rather object to the implication that women in science (or any other field) have nothing better to do that moon over the menfolk all day long - and the implication that we are so at the mercy of our hormones, we'll sacrifice everything we've worked for to get to the nearest source of testosterone.

And if we look at it from the opposite side, there's something here that's even more disturbing - the implication that women are to blame for men's reactions to them, that men just can't control themselves in our presence. At attitude that not only does a disservice to men, but underlies the rape culture that's a serious threat to girls and women.

I also have to wonder where, in Hunt's ideal segregated lab scenario, gay male scientists will be allowed to work.

When you criticize them, they cry...

First of all, crying is good for you. Crying is a sign that your physical and emotional stresses have built up to the point where your body can't store them anymore. Tears are the release valve on the pressure cooker, and science is ten kinds of pressure. But assuming scientists of any gender are doing the crying, they're not doing it in the middle of the lab. That's what bathrooms are for.

What's more interesting, again, are the underlying implications here. Is Hunt implying that crying is a thing only women do? Because that's patently untrue. Or are female scientists being excessively criticized compared to male scientists?

Yeah. That last one.

I've sat with male colleagues and been excluded from the conversation. One of my friends was frequently complemented on her appearance rather than her work. Another was told that women aren't smart enough for genetics and she should go into nursing instead. One ended up quitting her job because she couldn't handle the unrelenting misogyny. 

And that's just me and my female friends. Studies show that graduating classes in university engineering programs are now 20% women. But only 9.7% of working engineers are female. When asked why they left their field, many women cite the attitudes of their male coworkers.

Right now, Tim Hunt is the face of the problem, but he is the tiny visible tip of a massive submerged iceberg - a slow, persistent, pervasive discrimination that prevents women (and especially women who aren't white) from reaching their potential. 

Our society faces enormous challenges, challenges that only science and engineering can solve, and we need diverse minds with diverse approaches working on these problems. We need young girls to know that their skills and ideas are just as valuable as those of boys. And we need boys to grow up, get smart, and fling open the doors of the clubhouse.

If you can't adapt, you can always resign.

Tim Hunt did.

Check the responses of other female scientists here, here, or at the Twitter hashtag #distractinglysexy

For more on women in engineering, check out my book, Amazing Feats of Civil Engineering.

What do think about the Tim Hunt affair (see what I did there)? Have you observed these kinds of attitudes in your workplace or experienced them yourself? How can we change the story for women in science and engineering?