STEMinist – HerStory

 “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 emerge until humans developed social and technological structures related to agriculture, domestication, and eventually abstract concepts such as wealth and property [1]. Restrictions on women’s reproductive capacities, their ability to represent society, and inherit property and wealth and have been recorded as early as 3,000 BCE, according to some historians [2].

Famous Greek philosophers have said much about a woman’s role in the house and how she must obey her husband. Aristotle’s works have famously portrayed women as clearly less evolved than, and therefore inferior to, the perfect male specimen. The treatment of women as men’s property is therefore an ancient concept.

Egyptian women, on the other hand, had more rights in legal matters and participation in trade, as recorded by Herodotus. But the influence of the Greeks spread with their conquests, and so did patriarchy. Similarly, in China, the concepts of Confucianism dictated a woman’s place in society as obedient and subservient [3].

Image 1: Hypatia, an ancient Greek female scholar, was murdered by an angry mob in Alexandria.

We get it: patriarchy has been an accepted part of society for a very, very long time. But we have only recently realized it is a social construct rather than a biological one. A study conducted by a professor at the University of Maryland compared competition between women in two isolated tribes. The women of the patriarchal Maasai tribe, based in Tanzania, displayed significantly less competition than the men. Women of the matrilineal Khasi tribe in northeast India were found to be a lot more competitive [4]. So, the argument that women are “biologically inclined” to satisfy a certain role in society can be easily disputed.

Image 2: Women and girls of the Khasi tribe, a famously matrilineal tribe in India, in traditional dress.

In the history of science, women scientists have been systematically pushed into darkness. Bell Burnell, now known as the main scientist behind the discovery of pulsars (remnants of stars post-supernova), was overlooked while her supervisor Hewish won the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for the same discovery.

Lise Meitner laid the groundwork for the discovery of nuclear fission and atomic bombs and collaborated with Otto Hahn. But she found herself on the wrong side of history, as a Jewish woman in the time of the Nazis. So Hahn went ahead and published their findings alone and won the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Rosalind Franklin did not receive credit for her work on the structure of DNA, and her collaborator Wilkins won the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology for the same discovery [5]. There is no lack of such stories.

Every moment in which inequality has shown its ugly face, people have invoked terrible “logic” to justify not taking action to rectify the situation. As shown in “Hidden Figures”, during and after World War II, women dominated tech fields. However, none of their coding, computing, troubleshooting, and operating work was recognized, and their work was considered unintellectual. Men were less interested in computing and more interested in laboratory work until the potential of programming started to show. Suddenly, men wanted in. They took over the managerial roles, even though they lacked experience in comparison to the established women [6]. I am incredulous that it only took a few decades for programming to become such a male-dominated field.

Our girls will, at best, know Marie Curie amongst the illustrious list of scientists as they grow up to form idols and ambitions of their own. What they learn in schools and through media will influence their beliefs. It is time we acknowledge that women have been meticulously written out of the history that we teach our children. It is time that we put them back where they belong, in the hearts of young girls aspiring to be engineers and scientists.

By: Shreyasi Mukerji

Sources:

1. Eagly, Alice H. & Wood, Wendy (June 1999). “The Origins of Sex Difference in Human Behavior: Evolved Dispositions Versus Social Roles”. American Psychologist. 54 (6):408-423.
2. Lerner, Gerda (1986). The Creation of Patriarchy, Women and History. Oxford University Press. pp. 8–11.
3. Largen, Kristin Johnston (2017). "A Brief Introduction to Confucianism". Finding God Among Our Neighbors: An Interfaith Systematic Theology. Finding God Among Our Neighbors. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress. pp. 61–88.
4. Gneezy, U. , Leonard, K. L. and List, J. A. (2009), Gender Differences in Competition: Evidence From a Matrilineal and a Patriarchal Society. Econometrica, 77: 1637-1664.
5. "6 Women Scientists Who Were Snubbed Due To Sexism". News.Nationalgeographic.Com, 2019, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-women-scientists-overlooked-dna-history-science/
6. "Science Doesn’T Explain Tech’S Diversity Problem — History Does". The Verge, 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/16/16153740/tech-diversity-problem-science-history-explainer-inequality 

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