The Silenced Women of STEM

What do the most ravishingly beautiful actresses of the 1930s and 40s and the inventor whose concepts were the basis of cell phone and Bluetooth technology have in common? They are both Hedy Lamarr, the glamour icon whose ravishing visage was the inspiration for Snow White and Cat Woman and a technological trailblazer who perfected a secure radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes during WWII. T...

You’ve seen quinceañera dresses, right? Imagine having to perform surgery in that. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker thought the same thing. Mary was one of the most progressive women of her time, who became a surgeon and refused to wear dresses. This story is kinda insane, so buckle up. References: https://www.womenshistory.org/education-resources/biographies/mary-edwards-walker https://www.nps.gov/people/...

Sources https://www.amphilsoc.org/blog/cecilia-payne-gaposchkin-1900-1979 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/a-century-ago-pioneering-astrophysicist-cecilia-payne-gaposchkin-showed-us-what-stars-are-made-of-180986193/ https://www.britannica.com/biography/Cecilia-Payne-Gaposchkin https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosmic-horizons-book/cecilia-payne-profile

Have you ever thought, hmm my sugar needs to be sweeter? Well, India did. They enlisted the help of Janaki Ammal, an Indian Botanist sweetened sugar, saved a forest, and traveled the world in search of knowledge. This is her story. References: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-63445015 https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/pioneering-female-botanist-who-sweetened-nation-and-saved-v...

Imagine waking up every morning with joints so swollen and painful that even buttoning a shirt feels impossible, yet you still choose to spend your day hunched over delicate instruments, determined to uncover mysteries in chemistry. This was the world of Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, a woman who refused to be defined by pain or limited by the expectations of her time. References: https://www.nobelpriz...

What do royal wedding gowns, octopuses that look like aliens, and the invention of the aquarium have in common? One woman: Jeanne Villepreux-Power. Today, we’re diving into the story of a self-taught scientist who defied the odds, turned her home into a marine lab, and changed the way we study life in the ocean. References: https://oumnh.ox.ac.uk/learn-jeannette-villepreux-power https://www.themar...

It's 1963. You're 26 years old. You’ve left school at 16 to work in a textile factory. On weekends, you sneak off to jump out of airplanes, perhaps as an escape from day to day life. Suddenly, out of 400 candidates, you are chosen to become the first woman in space. You’re launched into orbit alone, riding in a spacecraft with settings so wrong, if you hadn’t caught the mistake, you would have dri...

Have you heard about how Henry the VIII of England and his six wives? There’s like a whole musical about it now called SIX. Well Henry being the king that he was kept getting rid of his wives for various reasons, a large one being that his wives were not giving him male children. Well, the joke’s on Henry because we now know that sperm which is produced by men holds the key for sex determination a...

6 years. What can you do in just 6 years? Could you change the world in 6 years? Probably not. But you know who did. Alice Ball. From graduating high school to her death, Alice Ball invented a technique in just 6 years that would change the world. References: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.jchemed.4c00611 https://www.britannica.com/topic/kava#ref90385 https://lhncbc.nlm.nih.gov/LHC-publicati...

Imagine your best friend gets murdered. You call the cops, expecting a team equipped with gloves, evidence bags, testing kits, all of that. Instead, they trample through the house, accidentally ruining all the evidence that could have led them directly to your friend's killer. While this would cause outrage in today’s society, this was normal in the 1800s. Investigators were not investigating back...

Did you know that most dentists back in the day did NOT have a dental license? It makes sense now why a lot of people were scared of going to the dentist. Because back then, you didn't know if your dentist was a guy who knew what he was doing or just some rando who liked teeth. Now imagine TRYING to get your dental license, so that you are credible, but you are basically barred from getting one be...

Imagine that you have 9 other siblings (maybe 8), but they all die except your one older brother. Your family is also incredibly poor, but you enjoy hunting fossils with your father. Even though you have NO education, he helps you learn geology and anatomy. But then he also dies. Now you are even poorer. And even though it is frowned upon for a girl, your mother makes you continue laboring for fos...