Well, today is #WomenInScienceDay!

[Lordfrontpaw]

Let's hope this generation of children aren't listening to the gender stereotypes that 'Barbie don't do science'.

Ada Lovelace - widely credited as the first programmer
Irene Joliot-Curie - discoverer of the first artificial radioactive element, like her mother awarded the Nobel for chemistry
Lise Meitner - discovered fission.
Caroline Herschel - her brothers work is well known, but she did most of the heavy mathematical lifting and was a professional astronomer in her own right
Donna Strickland - nobel prize for physics winner in 2018 for chirped pulse amplification which enables massively more powerful lasers

There are so many women out there making massive strides everyday, but now we make changes that are harder to get the big picture on. I was in a mindblowing lecture recently on technology that Donna Stricklands work will make possible and that will change lives, but for all scientists we suffer from moving from the time of 'big bang' discoveries with single authors, to incremental change with massive collaborations being the norm

Ada Lovelace - widely credited as the first programmer

That's a little like describing Leonardo Da Vinci as "a bit of a painter".

Ada Lovelace not only worked out how the entire process of programming a stored program computer would look. She completely grasped what it meant - way ahead of anyone else. If she had lived and/or been a man, it's almost impossible to think she would not have addressed or envisaged the Entscheidungsproblem a century ahead of Turing.

#Girlyswot

Marie Tharp - mapped the ocean floor and discovered the mid-Atlantic ridge, confirming the thory of plate tectonics. Largel uncredited in her lifetime.

Sorry Serendipity, I was reducing her achievements about the same as saying Marie Curie discovered radium reduces her life and work.

Yes Mockers, I was reading about Marie Tharp recently, and how she was never allowed to go out to sea to actually collect her own data as it wasn't right for a woman!

Just looking round (Biology dept) of the techs and PhD students, 11 women vs 3 men, but at the PI level 5 men to 2 women. Post docs - 3 men to 3 women. That's just on this floor, not sure on others.

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna: CRISPR-Cas9 - thank you, saved me weeks of plasmid prep!

And do not froget the first Western female scientist, Hypatia of Alexandria, and what happened to her courtesy of the church.

Hang in there, women in science. We need you now more than ever!