School houses

Our (mixed) school changes class names every 2 years. Last times was famous locals. Not many women, sadly. Now we have famous female scientists. I discussed Marie Curie and radiation with DS aged 6 yesterday.

DD's school houses are the names of 4 women - the founders of the school. Very Harry Potter-esque though has been the case from way before HP times. All women but then it is a girl's school.

Many of our local schools with a house system seem to use the 4 main local rivers following through the city, or bigger local park names.

Junior school was birds of prey
Senior school was influential women - but it was a girls school

Ours are harry potter houses....

I've just seen it's an American site but still seems excellent. There needs to be more awareness of all the women excelling in these fields so girls know they're "for them" as well.

Great posts PrincessWonderRabbit and thanks for posting the link and about Emily Warren Roebling. I think the site looks great and will try to see if the younger years at my school can be informed of it. There's also "ScienceGrrl" about STEM more generally, along similar lines; I think these campaigns/resources have the potential to be great for girls.

But that would have put me right off as a child, so not being negative just pointing it out.

Yes, but it's not a resource for women. It's for girls. Most things designed for children tend to be on the twee side (though I don't think is especially) They either do that or "Super Rad Awesome cool" which invariably gets it so wrong that even this mid thirty something is cringing. I don't see the point in being negative about something that's attempting to redress a problem in this country.

It's a bit twee, as is the logo. The engineers listed are women!

What's wrong with engineer girl? It's geared toward children. It's not a resource for women

Engineergirl oh dear. I guess it depends where you live too. I meet a lot of women in the industry. In fact I'm going to a womans networking event for the construction industry in a couple of weeks time. ( I wonder if any men will rock up claiming to identify as female?)

Surely this woman deserves a house?

Emily Warren Roebling was, and still is, considered to be the person who was in charge of the day to day construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Conceived by her father-in-law, John A. Roebling, the Brooklyn Bridge is one of the largest engineering projects in America's history. In the late 1800's, there was no greater challenge than spanning the East River from Brooklyn to New York.

So, in 1869, John Roebling began designing the Brooklyn Bridge. Emily became involved in the Brooklyn Bridge project when her father-in-law died and her husband, Washington, took over as master bridge builder. In order to help her husband as much as she could, Emily started studying topics in civil engineering - math, strength of materials, stress analysis, and cable construction. In 1872, Washington came down with an illness that left him bed-ridden and partially paralyzed.

Now, Washington had to rely on Emily to carry out plans for completion of the bridge. Emily became such a major participant in the project that many people began to believe she was Chief Engineer. In addition to answering questions about the bridge from officials and contractors, Emily also kept all the records, answered Washington's mail, delivered messages and requests to the bridge office, and represented Washington at social functions.

One interesting story, although historians disagree on its validity*, reports that Emily attended a meeting of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) on behalf of her husband. Questions had come up about her husband's ability to head the Brooklyn Bridge project. Supposedly, Emily delivered a moving speech at the ASCE meeting on behalf of her husband that ensured his position as Chief Engineer.

Emily Roebling never planned on becoming an engineer. However, she accomplished what could only be describes as a huge engineering feat for that time.

*Personal communications with historian Don Sayenga on August 31 and October 18, 2015.

Oh Op look at this!

www.engineergirl.org/4356.aspx

Also 9% of engineers are women. That's not a few, theyre woefully under represented clearly but they're there. The UK has the fewest at 9% and other EU countries go up to 30% almost like we could do better.

Architects. Long line of famous female architects.

But thank you for proving my point Tbb.

What do you have against positive discrimination?

I might pick 5 historical people who matter and they'd be entirely different to yours. So what we do is go through and pick 5 who matter to everyone. It's what you do if you give a shit.

Historical being the key word. There are few female engineers even today. It unlikely using a random draw to pick out female engineers. Even if they were choosing the most important a woman would rip up relatively far down the list. Are you asking that they use positive discrimination? Wouldn't that set an even worse example to your daughter. I thought feminism was about encouraging and enabling women to do just as well as their male counterparts not pretending that this has always been the case.

Personally I wouldn't bring it up at anprent's evening as unless you live in a super right on area the parents will do the unthinking, defend the status quo thing. "Nothing wrong with learning about male engineers, women just didn't do anything don't you know etc."

I'd try and find a few like minded parents to each write a small (couple lines) message about why it's important and then submit to the head. My guess is they genuinely didn't think about it and will realise the error pretty quickly as schools are meant to be getting girls in to STEM.

I'd never realised this before but now I think about it all my houses at school were men too (Whittle, Bannister, Flemming, Pettit and Hillary if I remember)

Never even realised when I was at school, but I guess that's the point.

At my all girls grammar school (so an environment in which high expectations are held for students) the houses were named after local 'large' houses/estates. owned by rich white men I always felt they were missing a trick. Surely they could have found 6 inspirational women from any field.

Indeed scallops. This kind of unthinking sexism has the potential to have a real impact on children.

flossyfloss you could show your daughter this: www.crossrail.co.uk/careers/engineer-your-future which highlights the number of women working as engineers on Crossrail (around a third). Of course it's far from adequate but it's excellent that such a major project has a relatively decent number of women working on it, with a number of the stations being project managed by female engineers. You could also tell her about Roma Agrawal: www.romatheengineer.com/showpage.php?pagename=home

The houses at my brothers' school are named A, B, C, D, E, F, G and H

DS1 starts school this term, and the five houses at his (mixed state primary) school are all named after composers. Which on one level as a classical music enthusiast I like, but all the houses are named after dead white men.

And yes, I definitely think you should raise it. A lack of knowledge of female role models in IT and engineering and other STEM fields is one reason girls are less likely to consider it as a career. They need to know women have succeeded, so they could do it too - and men need to know women can do it, just as much.