The Sydney Feminists

    This image shows Bell Burnell as a graduate smiling in front of a radio telescope .   https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23531370-800-finding-the-first-pulsar-set-my-world-spinning/   A pulsar is a rapidly spinning dead star chunk that emits beams of electromagnetic radiation, like the lights on a lighthouse, out into space. They were first witnessed in 1967 by astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell and are one of the strangest objects the universe has to offer. In a controversial decision, Bell Burnell missed out on the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery. All the credit went to her thesis professors.   Early Life   Born on July 15 th , 1943, in Belfast, Ireland, Bell Burnell enjoyed science from a young age. Her parents encouraged her interest. When she failed a higher learning exam, they sent her off to England where she would have a better chance of succeeding. She excelled in her classes and went to the University of Glasgow to study a Bachelor...

The more I travel and work in various cities and countries, encountering difficulties as a mechanical engineer in a male-dominated industry, the more I am aware of my privilege growing up in a feminist Indian family. At 12 years old, when I had only recently moved out of India, wanting to be an engineer seemed anything but unusual. Of course, it was convenient for me that most parents in India are obsessed with pushing their children towards STEM-based careers. Girls often outperform boys to bag the coveted 1 st rank in the highly publicized senior board exam results, with impossibly perfect grades in mathematics and science. 1 : The toppers of Central Board of Secondary Education final 12th grade exams in 2019, with their grades As I stepped out of India and met the rest of the world, I found myself more and more alone in classes and then workplaces. Research at Open University found that 35% of specialist technology roles in India are filled by women, compared to 17%...

Meir and Koch. Picture: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/05/science/NASA-female-spacewalk.html On October 18 th , 2019, NASA astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir made history. They were the first all-woman team to perform a spacewalk on the International Space Station (ISS). Koch and Meir follow in the footsteps of other pioneering space women. For example, the  first female spacewalk took place 35 years ago. The Historic Spacewalk Koch during the Spacewalk. Picture: https://www.inverse.com/article/60248-spacewalk-all-female At 07:38am (North American time), Koch exited the ISS in an extravehicular activity suit (space suit), followed a short time later by Meir. The two women went to work replacing a faulty battery charge/discharge unit. The device is one of a few pieces of equipment that is responsible for regulating the station’s power. It had failed the previous week but was not critical to life support. However, the task needed to be completed...

  “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...

Try Googling women in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math). You will find articles upon articles about how and why women are underrepresented in STEM. You might also find some articles on female role models, statistics of women in various STEM fields and the rate at which they drop out of higher education, discrimination in the workplace, and so on. The next chapter of this discussion would logically be a conversation about encouraging little girls to pursue STEM fields. Some people continue to argue that girls just aren’t interested in science and maths. This is a myth scientists have busted repeatedly. Statistics from various journal articles prove that girls and boys show equal interest in science and maths in elementary/primary school. Research also shows that girls’ performance in such subjects matches boys up until biases take over.   Similar numbers dismiss the myth that girls are “bad at maths”. The most heartbreaking part of this myth pertains to the fac...

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...