Women in STEM, then and now

These teaching notes contain more information on the following topics:

• Historical women in STEM
• Celebrating women and girls in your classroom
• Mary Jackson
• Wind tunnels and aerodynamics
• Women and girls in STEM today

Historical Women in STEM 

Check out the following links to learn about the historical achievements of women in STEM:

• 10 women in STEAM who changed the world
• The untold history of women in science and technology
• Women scientists whose discoveries were credited to men

According to Viterbi Conversations in Ethics, a forum for discussing engineering ethics published by the Viterbi School of Engineering at the University of Southern California, some examples of women’s work being credited to men include:

• Lise Meitner discovered what is now known at the Auger effect, two years before the same effect was discovered by Pierre Victor Auger. She also worked with Otto Hahn to discover nuclear fission, for which Hahn won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944.
• In the 1970s, Vera Rubin discovered dark matter, but her work was claimed by her coworker Kent Ford. 
• Alice Ball discovered the cure for leprosy, but her work was not recognized for almost 90 years. 

According to “Erasing women from science? It is called the Matilda Effect” accessed on JSTOR Daily, a publication that provides analysis on current events, research and ideas:

• Marie Curie was rare in the sense that she was one of few women whose accomplishments were recognized in her time. 
• For many women, claiming credit for their inventions was difficult, because of limited social and financial ability meant that they could rarely reap the benefits of their work or fully exercise their inventive powers. 

Here is a list of what the History Channel calls Nine Groundbreaking Women Inventors: 

• 1880, Maria E Beasley, the life raft
• 1885, Sarah E. Goode, fold-out bed
• 1886, Josephine G. Cochran, dishwasher
• 1893, Margaret A. Wilcox, car heater
• 1948, Bessie Virgina Blount, feeding tube
• 1966, Stephanie L. Kwolek, Kevlar
• 1969, Marie Van Brittan Brown, home security system
• 1988, Patrica E. Bath, cataract treatment
• 1991, Ann Tsukamoto, stem cell isolation

Celebrate Women and Girls in your classrooms:

February 11 is International Day of Women and Girls in Science

March 8 is United Nations International Women’s Day to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women.

Mary Jackson’s NASA Biography

Mary Jackson was recruited in 1951 to the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which became the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in 1958. She began as a research mathematician, or human computer, at the Langley Research Center. She began working in the Supersonic Pressure Tunnel in 1953. To become an engineer, she needed to take graduate-level courses at Hampton high school, an all-white school in segregated Virginia, and she needed to petition the city of Hampton to allow her to attend the classes. In 1958, Jackson became NASA’s first Black female engineer and worked with data from wind tunnel experiments and real-world flight experiments. She spent her career working to make changes and support women and other minorities to advance in science, engineering and mathematics.  

Wind tunnels and aerodynamics

DEWESoft’s List of wind tunnel testing facilities:

• What is a wind tunnel? A tube-like test setup with powerful fans to create air flow at a known velocity, pushed past models or full-size objects to understand airflow and optimize design. 
• The wind tunnels are made for testing and predicting wind load for all kinds of structures moving through air or affected by wind force: bridges, vessels, aircraft, buildings, vehicles, wind turbines, and numerous offshore structures, or parts and components of these. Even objects like parachutes, vehicle trailers or tennis balls are tested in wind tunnels.

Haynes’s Aerodynamics and how they affect fuel economy: 

• Aerodynamics is the study of airflow around your car. The smoother the airflow, the lower the drag and the less fuel you burn at a specific speed.
• Moving a vehicle requires energy. At urban speeds, friction and rolling resistance are responsible for most of the fuel burned and aerodynamic drag isn’t a big factor. But these frictional forces are linear. 
  • Travelling at 60 km/hour requires no more than twice the energy as travelling at 30 km/hour. 
  • Aerodynamic drag is different, increasing in proportion to the square of the speed. This means that at highway speeds the frictional drag is no longer the main gas user – aerodynamic drag will now account for more than half of the fuel one is using, or even more. The faster you go, the more fuel you use pushing your car through the air. 
• Things that make vehicles more aerodynamic include rounded edges, air dams to reduce drag under the vehicle, side skirts to control airflow under the vehicle, rear spoilers to reduce lift, angles of windows and shapes of mirrors.

Women and girls in STEM today

See: International Day of Women and Girls in Science 

According to the United Nations, women are typically given smaller research grants than their male colleagues and, while they represent 33.3% of all researchers, only 12% of members of national science academies are women.

• In cutting edge fields such as artificial intelligence, only one in five professionals (22%) is a woman.
• Despite a shortage of skills in most of the technological fields driving the Fourth Industrial Revolution, women still account for only 28% of engineering graduates and 40% of graduates in computer science and informatics.
• Female researchers tend to have shorter, less well-paid careers. Their work is underrepresented in high-profile journals and they are often passed over for promotion.

According to Randstad, one of the top employment agencies in Canada, here is a look at women in STEM careers in 2023:

• Women make up less than 25% of people employed in STEM careers. According to Statistics Canada, 34% of Canadians with a STEM degree are women. They make up only 23% of Canadians working in science and technology.
• As of 2019, there are over 6.3 million women scientists and engineers in the European Union, representing 43% of STEM employees.
• According to research conducted by the United Nations:
  • Less than 30% of the world’s researchers are women.
  • Nearly 22,000 more women are working as science and engineering technicians than in 2016. However, women still only make up 27% of the total workforce.
  • Women make up 42% of the total number of science professionals.
  • Women only make up 15% of the total management roles in science, engineering, and technology.

UN Secretary-General Guterres calls for more empowerment for women and girls:

• Fewer than 30% of the world’s scientific researchers are women
• “Science and innovation can bring life-changing benefits, especially for those who are furthest behind – such as women and girls living in remote areas, the elderly and people with disabilities.”
• According to the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), women in science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) are published less, paid less for their research and do not advance as far as men in their careers.

The STEMforGIRLS site is a resource for educators and students including featuring many female role models working in STEM fields.