When asked to name women who have made history there are many that you could choose. Some famous candidates from the history books are Cleopatra, Harriet Tubman, Susan B. Anthony, and Eleanor Roosevelt. Modern high-ranking, high-profile role models might be Sandra Day O’Connor, Barbara Walters, Condoleezza Rice, Oprah Winfrey, or Benizir Bhutto. However, if asked to name three women who have made history in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, could you? Perhaps you could rattle off Marie Curie, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize—two, in fact, one in chemistry and one in physics. She is the only scientist ever to receive the prize in two different disciplines.
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Then there are the countless STEM pioneers whose names you probably don’t recognize. Women like Virginia Apgar, the pioneer of anesthesiology, or Lise Meitner, one of the co-creators of the theory of nuclear fission, whose male partner, Otto Hahn, received the Noble Prize for their joint research while she was overlooked. More recent leaders include Virginia “Ginni” Rometty, a computer scientist and electrical engineer by training and the first female CEO of IBM. The truth is that all of these women have made history; however, women as a whole, from the lab to the office to the boardroom, are woefully underrepresented in STEM fields. Part of the reason is a lack of visible role models. A wage gap between male and female workers and strong gender stereotypes are also attributed to discouraging women’s participation in STEM. According to the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey, women comprise 48 percent of the US workforce but only 24 percent of STEM workers. The University of California-Davis Study of California Business Leaders noted that in booming Silicon Valley, women still hold fewer than one in ten of the highest-paid executive positions and board seats at the top public firms in California. That means more than onethird, or 136 of the 400 major Silicon Valley eberly.wvu.edu
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