Women in STEM

As the Women's History Month comes to an end, I felt like there was the need to talk about a group of women who don't always get the credit they deserve: those are the women in STEM.

As a woman who has graduated in a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) degree and is looking to pursue a career in the same area, I think there is a big challenge in that world for me and other women like myself. The STEM world is mostly known as a world dominated by men, so women who are part of this world are often looked down upon and not credited enough for their work.

If you ask someone to give you the name of a person who has made a big impact on the world of technology or evolution, the first person they would think of would be a man. Why? Because people don’t really speak about the work done by women in STEM.

So, as a person whose classroom has been mostly filled by men as women have been taught that STEM is “a man’s job”, I’d like to introduce you to some women who have made a massive impact in STEM, but have also changed the world:

• Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson is probably one of the most well-known women in science. She was a mathematician who worked for NASA and had a massive impact on the Apollo Program. She was the person to do the calculations that helped the NASA’s Apollo Lunar Module spacecraft to land on the moon. This was a big step for humanity as this work has led to the first landing of a man on the moon. Katherine Johnson has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom which is America’s highest civilian honour.

• Marie Curie

Another big name in science, Marie Curie was a chemist and physicist who was best known for her discovery of radium and polonium, and her huge contribution towards finding treatments for cancer. During the First World War, she worked to develop small, mobile X-ray units to help discover injuries in near the battlefront. Marie Curie was the holder of 2 Nobel Prizes.

• Margaret Hamilton

Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist who also had a big impact in NASA’s Apollo Program, leading the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. She is one of the first computer software programmers, being the person who came up with the term of “software engineer”. In 2016, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

• Katie Bouman

Katie Bouman is a modern-day engineer and computer scientist who led the development of the algorithm that took the famous first image of a black hole back in 2019, when she was only 29 years old. In 2021, she had an asteroid named after her.

Maybe Women's History Month has come to an end, but we should not end the talk about the important women in our world, our lives and we need to keep fighting for women rights.