The Sydney Feminists

  “Hidden Figures” made waves in the movie industry for portraying the brilliant, female, collective, computational minds behind one of the greatest scientific and engineering feats in history: putting humans on the moon. This movie showed us that there has been no lack of brilliant women contributing to STEM fields through history. We also know that women’s contributions to science, math, technology and engineering have been systematically written out of our history books.   All this complaining about not enough women idols in STEM fields for our future generations and we never stopped to wonder at what point in history we decided women were bad at math and science?  The history of patriarchy is hard to identify. For so many years, in the majority of societies around the world, patriarchy has been so widely accepted that it wasn’t even identified as a type of operating system until recently. The word “patriarchy” literally means “rule of the father” and did not em...

Dorothy Hill. Image Source:  https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-04/dorothy-hill/9015194 Scientist Dorothy Hill was was hugely influential in Australian geology. She was a crucial part in the first major studies of the Great Barrier Reef and was the first woman to become a professor at an Australian university. A lot of her work took place at the University of Queensland (UQ). The Engineering and Science Library there was named in her honour. Hill was born on September 10 th , 1907, to Robert Sampson Hill and Sarah Jane Kington. She was the third oldest of seven children and grew up near Brisbane. Hill excelled in school and had ambitions of becoming a medical researcher when she was older. Teachers noted her natural intelligence and drive. Brisbane Girls’ Grammar School, Hill was awarded the Phyllis Hobbs Memorial Prize for English and History. As high school came to an end, Hill contemplated what she wanted to do for the rest of her life. The only medical de...