GIRL POWER

Don’t get stuck in the pink rut

You may have seen recent films about Madame Marie Curie, whose extensive study of radioactivity led to two Nobel Prizes and is featured in the film Radioactive, or mathematicians Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan, three African American women who many consider the brains behind the early days of the U.S. space efforts portrayed in Hidden Figures.

Or on TV, maybe you’ve taken note of The Big Bang Theory and the portrayal of the slightly nerdy, super smart neuroscientist Amy Farrah Fowler played by Mayim Chaya Bialik (who actually IS a super-smart neuroscientist as well as an actress.)

However, according to the most recent U.S. data, only one in six engineers is a woman. Only about two in every five chemists, scientists who study the properties of different substances, are female. And there is only one woman in computer science and mathematics for every three men.

WHAT? Those disparate numbers are shocking! Are we still fighting stereotypes (long-held attitudes and beliefs that aren’t based on facts) in the 21st century?

UGH! MAYBE. One heavily prevalent stereotype is that boys naturally do better than girls in math and science. But there is little evidence to support this idea. Indeed, there is a lot of evidence that girls are just as talented in math and science as boys. In the United States, girls and boys score about equally well in state testing and class subjects. In many other countries, girls actually outperform boys in math and science. That’s the finding of a study that came out a few years ago in the journal Intelligence.

Despite this, Jean Morrison, provost at Boston University, says the idea that boys are better at math and science remains “deeply ingrained.” This means that people can hold onto an idea for a long time even without any evidence to back it up. And those deeply ingrained ideas may affect people in ways that aren’t obvious. They can even lead girls to perform worse on math and science tasks, studies show.

The division of men and women is more equal in a few other fields. Women make up slightly more than half of all biologists, for instance. But among all scientists and engineers, women make up just 27% — or only slightly more than one in four — of these workers. A number of programs are trying to raise those numbers by sparking an interest in girls for science, technology, engineering and math, aka STEM. But there’s another issue: Too few people — male or female — are studying engineering in college. Before long, the United States will face a “skills gap.” People will lack the training to fill all the jobs that will be available.

For girls who want to work in science, astronomer Debra Elmegreen has some advice: Work hard.

“Actually, it’s similar to the advice I give boys,” she says. First, she says, take lots of math and science classes in high school and college. “Second, don’t let anyone tell you, ‘You can’t do it.’”

Elmegreen followed her own advice on her path to becoming a scientist. As a child growing up in South Bend, Indiana, in the 1950s and 1960s, she was mesmerized by the stars in the night sky. She knew that she wanted to be an astronomer (a scientist who studies space). As a high school student in 1971, she entered the Science Talent Search and won eighth place for studying bursts of radio waves coming from the planet Jupiter.

She attended Princeton University in New Jersey as part of only the third class that included women. She became the first woman to leave the university with a degree in astrophysics. She then went on to

graduate from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Most of the men around her treated her as an equal, she says, but there were exceptions.

“There were comments from guys sometimes who said, ‘You shouldn’t be doing this,’” she recalls. “But I didn’t let them get to me. My professors were supportive, and most of the students were supportive.”

Elmegreen recommends that young scientists get involved early with science fairs and competitions. “They put you in touch with your future peers at an early age,” she says. At a science fair, you “realize there are other people like you who want to do what you want to do.”

INSPIRING MINDS

Boomerang would like to introduce you to some women who have followed their quantum dreams!

Lisa Glaser

Glaser is in to small stuff. Very, very small stuff. She studies quantum gravity. This is an area of science that describes how tiny particles such as atoms and protons might react to the forces of gravity. Glaser is a physicist at Radboud University in Nijmegen in the Netherlands. Before she became a scientist, Glaser spent her teenage years teaching kids karate.

Susanne Pumpluen

Do you like math? Pumpluen sure does. She studies math at the University of Nottingham in England. Many people might think modern math requires complicated computers. But Pumpluen says it doesn’t. “I don’t even need the internet,” she says. “I need a piece of paper, [and] I need a pen.”

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Johanna Teske

“I’m an astronomer who studies exoplanets and their host stars,” explains Teske. (Exoplanets are planets that orbit around stars other than the sun.) Her team’s goal is to understand the diversity of planets in the Milky Way galaxy. She works at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

In her free time, Teske runs marathons. Her friends even make astronomythemed signs to cheer her on! Vanessa Lucieer works at the University of Tasmania in Australia as a marine spatial analyst at the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies. She studies acoustic (sound) data to map the seafloor. Recently, she turned some of those images into art. Last month she had her first exhibition: Oceans of the Unknown. With other seafloor scientists from around the world, she’s creating a collection of these images on the internet to “share the wonder” of the oceans’ unique shapes, patterns and textures.