March is Women's History Month! Quick - name a famous woman scientist! Can you? Well, I asked my physics class yesterday to name a woman dead or alive who has made a contribution to science and the only name any one could drum up without racing to their cell phones to look it up was of course: Marie Curie - and that was a struggle, I had to give hints. And then I asked them to name men and, you betcha, the names flew out. Why the discrepancy? Is it because there are no women in history who have made a contribution to science? The answer of course is an emphatic NO. Without getting on my feminist high horse and arguing that women have been written out of history by the dominant group to perpetuate marginalization, blah blah blah....let me just point you to a few songs I wrote to try to bring some parity to our history.
Hi Tech Girl: A Brief History of Women in Science
Annie Jump Cannon
And for fun: Einstein's Angels
And here is an excellent website: 4000 Years of Women in Science:
http://www.astr.ua.edu/4000WS/
And here is a website that I helped Geoff Marcy make a million years ago on the History of Women in Astronomy:
http://astro.berkeley.edu/~gmarcy/women/history.html
Lovon!
