Welcome to Woman Crush Wednesday! A few sobering statistics on the state of women in science before we dive into our weekly reading list: Women earn roughly 18 percent of computer science degrees; white men earning their doctorates in physics outnumber women of color by a factor of 333 to 1; and women make up less than 30 percent of environmental scientists and geoscientists. WTF, right?!
If you’re riled up, here’s another fact to fuel the fire: Even if they make it into a STEM field, women still earn less than their male counterparts. Our picks this week aren’t just breaking barriers for ladies in STEM, but also for every lady trying to make that paper — or at the very least, get her face on it.
Here’s who we’ve been crushing on this week:
- Cecilia Fire Thunder, Sally Ride, Rachel Carson and the rest of our nominees for the new $10 bill. (Grist)
Grist / Wikimedia
- Sarah Clatterbuck Soper and Allie Rubin, for two very different but truly great responses to last week’s Tim Hunt fiasco. Soper, a molecular biologist, detailed male scientists’ reluctance to take on female trainees in the lab, while Rubin, a student getting her Ph.D. in geology, wrote a hilarious parody of female stereotypes a la Megan Amram. (New York Times and Medium)
- Meryl Streep — yes, that Meryl Streep — for writing to every single member of Congress to ask for their support of the long-debated (92 years long, not that we’re counting) Equal Rights Amendment. Streep writes: “A whole new generation of women and girls are talking about equality — equal pay, equal protection from sexual assault, equal rights.” (Vanity Fair)
- Jami Valentine, co-founder of the website African American Women in Physics; Luz Martinez-Miranda, president of the National Society of Hispanic Physicists; and other women of color earning their doctorates in physics. Between 1973 and 2012, just 66 black American women earned physics doctorates across the country, compared to more than 22,000 white men. Say what? (Quartz)
- Amina Harris, director of the Honey and Pollination Center at the Robert Mondavi Institute for Wine and Food Science at UC Davis. Harris just finished developing a flavor wheel with nearly 100 different tastes and aromas, from “locker room” to “grapefruit” to describe the taste of honey. I think I’d rather have the latter than the former. (Civil Eats)
Stay tuned for next week’s roundup!
