In honor of Larry Summers' return to the media spotlight, I thought I'd take a moment to recognize the women in math and science whom I look up to.
One of the biggest names in my own field, quantum computation, is Julia Kempe. At age 34, she has degrees in math (bachelors, masters, PhD), physics (bachelors, masters) and computer science (PhD). Yeah, she has two PhDs. She also has in impressive list of publications, including two hugely important results. Along with co-authors, she showed that building a quantum computer requires being able to interact at most 3 "quantum bits" at a time. She also showed that two types of quantum computers, circuit-based and adiabatic, were equally powerful.
In other fields, I have a lot of admiration for Nora Volkow and Alison Jolly. Nora Volkow is the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse. She has pioneered the use of brain imaging techniques in understanding addiction, and has done a lot bring her results to the attention of the general public. Alison Jolly is a primatologist, and author of Lucy's Legacy , one of the best popular science books I've ever read.
So who are your favorites?
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You might enjoy this little blog about how women might be self-selecting out of science in an acedimc context and into professional careers that make more money.
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
"Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United States.
This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs."
*academic* sorry for the typing flub
Actually, I've read a lot of Philip Greenspun's essays, including that one, and I agree with a lot of what he has to say. There's probably some truth to women self-selecting out of science for better jobs, but I know for a fact that there's also active discrimination against women every step of the way. Not by most people, but by enough to make it a problem.
If anyone self-selects out of math and science, I don't blame them. In fact, I get my Masters in about a month and then I'm getting the hell out myself. In academic math and science, the real "pay" is doing work you enjoy. Unfortunately, at the grad student level, it's really hard to find an advisor who will let you do that work.
"This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of women in science: They found better jobs."
The same is said about nursing, traditionally a "female" job, and part of the reason behind a nursing shortage, and predicted only to get worse, as women find opportunities elsewhere. The entrance of males into nursing (about 10% of nursing students, and 5% of RNs nationwide) is not enough to make up the shortfall.
Actually, nursing schools turn away over 40,000 qualified applicants per year. The profession has no problem recruiting (although the number of men in nursing is indeed shamefully low.)
The real problem is a faculty and educational resources shortage wrought by decades of cyclical shortages that were remedied with quick fixes, doing nothing to prepare the educators and nurse scientists of the future. And guess what's being proposed today? Push more students through community colleges to become RNs quickly and efficiently (no matter that they haven't learned to think.) We've heard that before.
Actually, nursing schools turn away over 40,000 qualified applicants per year. The profession has no problem recruiting (although the number of men in nursing is indeed shamefully low.)
The real problem is a faculty and educational resources shortage wrought by decades of cyclical shortages that were remedied with quick fixes, doing nothing to prepare the educators and nurse scientists of the future. And guess what's being proposed today? Push more students through community colleges to become RNs quickly and efficiently (no matter that they haven't learned to think.) We've heard that before.
Back on topic: Gail Page is a nurse scientist who discovered that pain relief during and after cancer surgery prevents metastasis.
Dorothy Brooten, another nurse scientist, saved dollars and improved health of mothers and babies by sending advanced-practice nurses out to the homes of very low birthweight infants.
And of course Jane Goodall, who redefined the meaning of "human" when she observed chimpanzees using tools.
Only a few of my scientist women heroes.
"Actually, nursing schools turn away over 40,000 qualified applicants per year. The profession has no problem recruiting (although the number of men in nursing is indeed shamefully low.)"
You see the problem as one of supply, as do sources like the American Association of Colleges of Nursing and certain nursing school texts:
"Enrollment in schools of nursing is not growing fast enough to meet the projected demand for nurses over the next ten years."
"A shortage of nursing school faculty is restricting nursing program enrollments."
http://www.aacn.nche.edu/media/FactSheets/NursingShortage.htm
However (as also pointed out by my old texts) women's career options are simply not limited to traditionally female jobs such as nursing or teaching. Nursing is losing a potential pool of candidates (and nurses who love the profession at a significant rate) to e.g., other careers in math and science, and promotion of nursing as a career is seen, as with the "Nursing Shortage Fact Sheet," nearly as an afterthought - one paragraph out of six pages. Seeking ways to improve retention rates and reducing turnover, which is the usual approach, as one can peruse at
http://www.aacn.nche.edu/media/shortageresource.htm
cannot make up for this shortfall.
"In a statement released in March 2008, The Council on Physician and Nurse Supply, an independent group of health care leaders based at the University of Pennsylvania, has determined that 30,000 additional nurses should be graduated annually to meet the nation's healthcare needs, an expansion of 30% over the current number of annual nurse graduates." However, "HRSA [Health Resources and Services Administration] officials stated in an April 2006 report that 'to meet the projected growth in demand for RN services, the U.S. must graduate approximately 90 percent more nurses from US nursing programs.'"
Even those 40,000 additional qualified applicants per year will not translate into 30,000 additional graduates, or highly qualified nurses who remain in the profession. A larger pool of candidates (including men) is necessary.
"Nursing is losing a potential pool of candidates (and nurses who love the profession at a significant rate)"
Heh. I meant "nurses who LEAVE the profession at a significant rate"
Sonja Kovalevsky! My undergrad math department practically worshiped her. We had a shrine on the 3rd floor. We also studied women mathematicians during women's history month in our History of Math class, so I got to study/give a talk about Sophie Germain, who's another one of my favorites. And I definitely spent some time in my French classes chatting about Émilie du Châtelet. Noether, of course. I'm at the math department at UNL, and algebra is kind of a big deal here.
Yeah, Noether was awesome for sure. I was thinking about currently active mathematicians / scientists. What does Sonja Kovalevsky work on?
Kovalevsky's mostly famous for the Cauchy-Kowalevsky Theorem, in PDEs, but she's by no means recent.
Knowing anyone outside of your immediate environment or specific field in math is kind of difficult. I think Tomoko Fuse is a genius, though. Ruth Bari recently passed away, but her work in chromatic polynomials is pretty much everywhere. I really only did research in graph theory in undergrad, though.
Man, it is really sad when you actually stop to consider how few women there are in mathematics.
To keep things local, I'm a great admirer of a certain Ms Ingela Bruner, who (since taking on the job last year) is the first and only female principal of an Austrian university (although I have no idea whether or not "principal" is the correct term here). She was the first woman in Austria to get a degree in mechanical engineering in 1979.
How about Shirley Ann Jackson, current president of Rensselaer. She has a PhD in physics from MIT and a very impressive record. I heard her speak at my nephew's graduation and am now one of her fans.
http://www.rpi.edu/president/profile.html
I had an astro prof who was just a fabulous lecturer... and she taught class while nearing the end of her pregnancy. It was fucking cool to have a pregnant professor of astronomy. I can't remember her name for the life of me.
I admire pioneering women in history, such as Ada Lovelace, aka Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, and known as the first computer programmer. "She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities." - In the early 1800s, and before her death at 36.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace
Also, Marie Curie, "pioneer in the field of radioactivity, the only person honored with Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, and the first female professor at the University of Paris."
"Her achievements include the creation of a theory of radioactivity (a term coined by her[1]), techniques for isolating radioactive isotopes, and the discovery of two new elements, radium and polonium. It was also under her personal direction that the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms ("cancers"), using radioactive isotopes."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Curie
Emilie du Chatelet. I learned about Voltaire, I learned about Newton, but nobody bothered to tell me that she was involved with Voltaire and corrected Newton on the formula for kinetic energy. I accidentally discovered her when I was curious what the Chatelet metro stop in Paris was named after (it's not after her).
Voltaire called her "a great man whose only fault was being a woman." Speaks volumes. The Guardian has an article on her called The Scientist that History Forgot that says that the reason she was forgotten was that people couldn't deal with a woman being that smart.
just further proof that women can do just a well in math and science as men can. its always been a long standing stereotype that women score lower in theses two fields than men.
Great points about women in science, yet another test of how far we've come, or have yet to go, is the transition of men and other diverse groups in traditionally female occupations. Currently, only one in ten elementary teachers are male, and only one in four overall.
How can we expect education, a social institution that supposedly promotes equity and egalitarian values, to be able to adequately promote such values when its workforce maintains deeply rooted gender disparities? I think its fantastic that we promote women, and other diverse groups, into the highest echelons of society, but I think to some extent we lose the forest for the trees.
We push and push for diversity in science, in our Nobel Laureates, and in our Executive Boardrooms, yet we care disproportionately less for who ends up teaching children and young people. Who would you want to spend six hours per day, five days per week, with your children? Can you name teachers other than your own? Ah, it seems as if we have precisely the kinds of teachers the market has demanded, and that makes me sad.
In light of this comment, and due to my complete lack of knowledge of anything scientific or mathematical, I'm going to say my heroes in the fields are my good friends Camelia Stan and Jennifer Feder, as well as my sister's good friend Wen Gao. A few everyday Janes making their way in the fields of math, chemistry, and math, respectively.
That might have something to do with the fast-track promotions men tend to get when employed in traditionally female jobs- in other words, there are few male (insert entry-level job here) because they were promoted to management in short order.
Glass escalator, ya know.
The glass escalator, considered by Williams (1992), is certainly a factor in teaching, but cannot possibly account totally for the perpetual lack of male applicants to positions in education. Now, we see fewer and fewer men actually being able to seek promotion because they are just not there in the first place. Where is the collective outrage here? There is none because teaching is so low status that no 'self-respecting' feminist would encourage his or her daughter, or perhaps son, to teach. Shoot for the stars, run a company, win the Nobel prize, become president.
Let us not forget Grace Murray Hopper either.
Rosalind Franklin! The X-ray crystallographer who was instrumental is working out the three-dimensional structure of DNA. She wasn't a soft spoken scientist-lady who was content to help with no credit. In fact, she wasn't working with Watson and Crick at all and disagreed with their practice of building models without much evidence.
Watson and Crick got the Nobel prize for this, but unfortunately Franklin passed away before the award was given.
Franklin's photos were stolen from her lab by Maurice Wilkins (he might say borrowed), whose name also appears on the landmark Watson & Crick paper in Nature. She is given a footnoted acknowledgement int he paper.
I am not only speaking as a Dane when I say that one of the most "important" (what other word should use?) women in physics right now (indeed one of the most important researchers in physics right now regardless of gender) is Lene Vestergaard Hau.
Last year she redefined Quantum Physics when she and her crew (in the "Hau Lab" at Harvard) managed to SLOW THE SPEED OF LIGHT (which has been assumed to be constant) by literally freezing it. This changes theoretical physics and will soon be used for something in applied physics and technology.
Senior mathematicians who have changed the course of mathematics: Cathleen Morawetz (of Morawetz multipliers) and Karen Uhlenbeck.
Donna Haraway! Biologist, but very influential in cultural studies and starting the ball rolling in the 80s around discussions of the suspension/creation of idenitiy in technology.
And she talks about science and technology in such a way that even if it is a very complicated text you can follow her ideas (if not the actual science) very well. I'm all humanties in my thinking and thus, easily lost in the worlds of science.
One of the greatest women in my field: Margaret Mead.
You'll have to look her up if you want to know more because I have to go to work. :)
Some of the women I admire most in science are my own friends. Smart, unafraid, successful young science graduate students who read manuscripts and philosophy and Feministing in the same day. We are all in science (though different fields) and support each other through the failed experiments and accepted papers, frustrating advisers and successful job interviews. I admire the hell out of those ladies!
A few more, currently in administrative roles
Susan Hockfield, the current president of MIT
Persis Drell, the director of SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator
Mary Anne Fox, chancellor of UC-San Diego
Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist. I got hooked on her thanks to my feminist boyfriend. Check out her blog -- judson.blogs.nytimes.com
Well, she's long-dead, but no computer scientist can forget Ada Lovelace. She was the first programmer, after all.
As for people still alive...how about Betty Jean Jennings AKA Jean Bartik? She was nearly fired when she married one of ENIAC's engineers, on the basis that being married now, she'd be getting pregnant and quitting soon anyway.
Heh, two my laptops are named after those two ladies. The other is named Grace, after Grace Hopper...ahem, I mean Rear Admiral Grace Hopper.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer. She invented the shell model of the nucleus, but was denied a university professorship based on the university's anti-nepotism laws at the time. (Her husband was a good, but not great physicist.)
However, she got the last laugh, as she was awarded a Nobel prize for her work.
I'm a really terrible math/science student in that I know no remarkable names in the field. In fact, I always wanted to study humanities, but that's a long story and I digress.
On that note, though, I'd love to share Siv Cedering's amazing 1986 poem
Letter from Caroline Herschel (1750-1848). The first time I read it, I nearly cried; so many people I study with, had they lived two hundred years ago, wouldn't have had the chance to even dream of Nobel prizes. Even I, who out of personal inclination don't aspire to much when it comes to numbers and all, recognise that once I wouldn't even have the opportunity to learn the subjects I'm taking.
Apologies for rambling, but I want to conclude by saying I completely respect women in math and science, for being a minority whose numbers are gradually increasing to the proportion it anyway ought to be.
My favorites include:
Susan Eggers, pioneer of Simultaneous Multithreading, which is used on microprocessors from IBM, Sun, and others (Intel markets it as "Hyperthreading", which you may be familiar with on their Pentium 4 and later products).
Hedy Lamarr (yes, the actress) for spread-spectrum frequency hopping. It may only be because I'm a computer engineer, but it seems like an important development to me.
Madeline Vionnet, for bias-cut fabrics. Despite the industrial revolution being largely based around British textiles, and despite the importance of fabric to the great age of sail in Britain, it was a French dressmaker who realized that tilting the warp and weft threads 45 degrees makes all the difference. In modern engineering, thread direction in carbon-fiber and fiberglass construction is foundational in material-science courses.
Of course, Marie Curie, not for being the first woman to win a Nobel prize, but for being one of a very few people ever to win two.