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...

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...

In 2009, I developed a tendency towards migraines. Since then, I have lived in four different countries with entirely different laws on medicine. Some drugs that are banned in one country aren’t in another and vice versa. For over ten years, I’ve searched for an effective replacement for my original migraine medication. During this time, a whisper of a question turned into a deafening demand: why is it so difficult to treat an ailment as common, yet incapacitating, as a migraine? The fact is, migraines affect one in five women. This statistic is disproportionate to the number of men who suffer from migraines (one in fifteen). Migraine research is rarely sex-specific, even though hormone levels affect migraine tendencies and can differ based on sex. The stigma around migraines - ridicule, doubt and disbelief by friends, family and colleagues – might be different if 20% of the male population suffered from these debilitating attacks. Yet migraines remain one of the most underfunde...

As a woman in STEM and the reluctant inheritor of a resting bitch face, paychecks and imposter syndromes have been easier to navigate than the perplexing relationship I’ve had with other women. I have found that I generally get along more easily with men than with women. I am aware that I am not the only woman who experiences this phenomenon, and that there are many factors which may have contributed to this, but I do believe that a rather large number of women in STEM fields seem to feel the same way. While there are undeniably women in every field that face similar situations with fellow women, there seems to be a disproportionate amount of them in fields related to science, math and technology. Personally, I’ve always had to make more effort to connect with most other women than with men, and the ones I did well with seem to face the same struggle. For the longest time I thought it was just a personality thing, which it perhaps is, in part. But being surrounded by other women from...