What Would L Life Be Without Women in STEM?

ife without women in STEM would be life with no meteorological tools to measure humidity; thanks, Katharine B. Blodgett1. Life without women in STEM would be life without accurate tuberculosis testing; thanks, Florence Seibert2. Life without women in STEM would be life with no doctoral degrees in the field of astronomy with a dissertation that detailed the composition of the natural lights of the night sky, stars; thanks, Cecilia Payne3. Without women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, wars would have ended differently; quite a few men would not have been awarded Nobel prizes4, and many minority cultures would not proudly carry the title of being the first5! The women who accomplished all of these things laid the foundation 1  Katharine

Burr Blodgett (1889-1979) - earned a bachelor’s degree from Bryn Mawr College and a master’s degree from the University of Chicago before becoming the first woman to earn a doctorate from England’s Cambridge University. She is known for helping with meteorological sciences by developing a device to measure humidity.

2  Florence

Seibert (1897-1991) - graduated from Yale University with a doctorate in biochemistry in 1923. During her 27 years of teaching at the University of Pennslyvania, she developed a system to purify a protein found in Tuberculosis that became the international standard for TB testing still in use today.

3  Cecilia Payne (1900-1979) - Earned her first de-

gree at Cambridge University in the 1920s; a time where women were not being granted degrees. She later came to the United States and became the first person to earn a doctorate in astronomy from Havard University. She is known for asking and answering “What are Stars made of?”

4  Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) - Known as the

First Lady of Physics and graduated from the National Central University of Nanking and University of California-Berkley. During World War II she was an intricate part of the U.S. Army’s secret project to develop the atomic bomb. Two of her male colleagues received a Nobel Prize in 1957 and her contributions went unrecognized.

5  Mae C. Jemison (1956-Present) - Graduated from

Standford University and Cornell University Medical School. In 1992 she became the first AfricanAmerican woman to travel into space.

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