Whitehouse.gov: "You should know who these women are"

Submitted by Minuteman on Tue, 2014-12-23 00:13

From a whitehouse.gov mailing list email:

'Katherine Johnson. Maria Klawe. Barbara McClintock. If none of those names sound familiar to you, it's time to change that.

Because the groundbreaking, and largely unsung, work and discoveries of these women -- and many more like them -- helped shape modern science. And inspiring more young women to pursue careers in science and technology starts with simply sharing these stories.

We've put together an interactive audio hub that allows you to do that easily: Listen to women from across the Administration tell the stories of their heroes. When you learn something new (and you will), pass this on.

Once you do, you can add an untold history of your own, and then make a commitment to honor the legacy of these remarkable women in the best possible way: by encouraging a young woman to pursue a career in science.

Incredible, inspiring stories like these ones can only fade into obscurity if we don't tell them. And the only way we'll see more like them is if we get the word out now.

Let's write these stories back into history permanently so that we can help create more of them.'

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Comments

... of history. After all, if they had been, doubt they would be mentioned at the site!

Many of these women are already very well-known to those in their respective fields of science. The reason they are not known much outside of them is because, alas, the history of science, math, etc., is rarely taught as part of science, or only the really big names are mentioned. Most people know about Einstein, for example, but not about Max Planck or Michelson and Morely. When Einstein said that if he stood tall it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants, it was people like Max Planck to whom he was referring. And is his name a household word? Nope. Also, whether or not one gets a mention in science class has a lot more to do with the times in which he or she did their thing; Rear Adm. (USN) Grace Hopper ("Amazing Grace" as her colleagues called her) made huge contributions to computer science (including coining the term "bug", but that was utterly insignificant contrasted with the fact that she wrote the world's first computer language compiler) but gets little press, not because she was a woman, but because at the time she did her thing, there were much bigger things churning - like WWII and the need for a way to stop the war ASAP. Einstein's e=mc2 formula added to J. Robert Oppenheimer's ("Oppie" as friends and colleagues called him) applied know-how created the first nuclear bombs (for right or wrong). So, who got the bulk of the press? Einstein. Even though Oppenheimer and the other Manhattan Project scientists did the applied work (no easy task), Einstein gets the champagne toasts. Why? Well, the theory was needed as something to start with -- no trivial matter. (But theory without application is useless, and while Einstein was an ingenious theoretical physicist, the poor man couldn't tie his own shoelaces. Without applied scientists, theoreticians would sure be interesting at cocktail parties, but that's about it. Yet without them, applied scientists would eventually run out of ways to do stuff -- so the relationship is symbiotic if either type of person is to be relevant, and it's pretty clear that Einstein and Oppenheimer knew this.) Second, Einstein looked interesting and was quite a character. That's it. He seemed every bit the mad scientist but had a grand-paternal cuddly sort of persona. That was that. Same rules for getting popularity with the public apply in science as anywhere else.

So yes, sometimes people don't get the recognition they are due because of time and place. But is it because of a deliberate effort to write them out of history for reasons such as sexism? No. If that were true, we wouldn't know of the women already listed on the whitehouse.gov site.

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Submitted by Matt on Tue, 2014-12-23 03:04