What’s up with this? By second grade, students of both sexes equate the word “scientist” exclusively with men?
And this: a friend’s fifth-grade daughter has to do a report on a scientist and the Famous Scientists List distributed by the teacher has only one woman on it?
(Huge frustrated sigh.)
Okay. I suppose if you have to choose just one person to represent the entirety of womankind’s contribution to scientific achievement, Marie Curie is a worthy choice. But … GOOD GLORY! … are there no other important female scientists to offer up to a classroom of boys and girls itching for people to emulate?
What about Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission? Or Rosalind Franklin, without whom we might never have deciphered the three-dimensional structure of DNA? Or Barbara McClintock, who won a Nobel Prize for her work in genetics? Or Maria Reiche, who dedicated her adult life to recording, protecting, and trying to decipher the giant ground drawings of the Peruvian desert? Or Sylvia Earle, the “best-known marine scientist on the planet”? Or Laurie Boyer, who is this very minute rocking the world of embryonic stem cell research?
There have been and continue to be so many interesting and important female scientists just waiting to be discovered. Writer friends—grown-ups and fifth-graders alike—take note: their stories need to be told. Get busy!