Originally posted on Instagram 17th June 2022

Happy Pride Month!!!

Discrimination against LGBT+ people is still widespread, and this also applies to STEM. Similar to women and people of colour, evidence has shown that the STEM fields are sometimes not accessible to queer people.

But there have, of course, been plenty of queer people involved in STEM throughout the years. Scroll to read about just a few of them!

Sara Josephine Baker (1873-1945)

Baker decided on a career in medicine at the age of 16, after her father and brother both died, leaving her to support her mother and sister. She studied at the New York Infirmary Medical College, a medical school for women, graduating in 1898.

Baker wore masculine-tailored suits to work and had the nickname ‘Dr Joe’ – she joked that her colleagues forgot she was a woman.

She spent her career fighting against the damages poverty wreaked on children, particularly newborns, and is also known for twice tracking down ‘Typhoid’ Mary Mallon.

Louise Pearce (1885-1959)

A contemporary and friend to Sara Josephine Baker, Pearce was a pathologist who helped to develop a treatment for African sleeping sickness. The disease killed 2/3 of Uganda’s population between 1900 and 1906; the drug Pearce assisted in developing would have an 80% success rate in curing patients.

She also investigated into treatments for syphilis, discovering a type of tumour in the process, alongside one of her colleagues.

Their findings led to the introduction of tryparsamide as the standard treatment for syphilis – it remained so until 1950.

I would like to be remembered as someone who was not afraid to do what she wanted to do, and as someone who took risks along the way in order to achieve her goals.

Sally Ride, the first known queer space traveller

Angela Clayton (1959-2014)

Clayton was an internationally known physicist and a campaigner for the rights of transgender people. She specialised in the fields of Nuclear Criticality Safety and Health Physics. She was a member of numerous groups on nuclear safety and has authored several papers on the issue.

Clayton was also actively involved in trade unions, both on a national and local level, and she was the first ‘trans observer’ to the UK’s TUC LGBT Committee. She fought tirelessly for trans rights – she had a traumatic transition herself – and was appointed a MBE in 2005 for ‘services to gender issues’.

Emma Haruka Iwao

Iwao is a current Japanese computer scientist and cloud developer advocate at Google. She was inspired by Japanese mathematicians, such as Yasumasa Kanada. Her master’s dissertation was written on high performance computer systems.

In 2019, Iwao broke the world record for most accurate value of pi, calculating it to 31.4 trillion digits. The record was again broken the following year by Timothy Mullican, but Iwao took it back earlier in 2022, calculating pi to 100 trillion digits.

Iwao identifies as queer.

See also:

• Blog post: Trota of Salerno
• Blog post: Chien-Shiung Wu
• Bitesize History: Summary