Originally posted on Instagram 4th June 2022

It’s common knowledge today that women are seriously underrepresented in STEM fields, and have been for a while.

In 1970, just 8% of STEM workers in the USA were women; by 2019, this figure had risen to 27%. The situation is even worse for women of colour — Black women make up 2.5% of the female STEM workforce, Latinas 2.3%, and Indigenous women 0.07%.

The numbers also vary when we break down the different fields—while maths has around 45% women, engineering has just 15%. Further, women are actually a majority when it comes to social sciences (64%), but these jobs only account for 3% of those across STEM. (All figures relate to 2019 in the USA)

However, this is not to say that women have not always been a part of STEM. From Ancient Greece to the present-day, women have been contributing to our understanding of these subjects.

In fact, the first person to be known as a ‘scientist’ was a woman—Mary Somerville.

The Matilda Effect

In 1883, feminist Matilda Jocelyn Gage wrote an essay entitled ‘Woman as an Inventor’. In it, she made the case that women’s contributions to science had been ‘grossly neglected’ even though ‘some of the world’s most important inventions are due to her’.

A century later, science historian Margaret Rossiter coined the term the ‘Matilda Effect’, which describes the erasure of women’s achievements in science.

Rossiter, who was emphatically told by a professor in 1969 that there had never been a woman scientist, has focused her research on uncovering these apparently non-existent women, and has been very successful at it, too.

That brain of mine is something more than merely mortal; as time will show.

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852)

Sources:

• https://daily.jstor.org/erasing-women-from-science-theres-a-name-for-that/
• https://www.yalescientific.org/2020/11/by-the-numbers-women-in-stem-what-do-the-statistics-reveal-about-ongoing-gender-disparities/
• https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/01/women-making-gains-in-stem-occupations-but-still-underrepresented.html
• https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/unheralded-women-scientists-finally-getting-their-due-180973082/

See also:

• Blog post: Trota of Salerno
• Blog post: Chien-Shiung Wu
• Bitesize History: Queer Women in STEM