Perceptions About Women in Science and Engineering History
Heidi Reeder Communication Seung Youn Chyung Organizational Performance & Workplace Learning Lynn Lubamersky History Pat Pyke STEM Station Cheryl Schrader Chancellor, Missouri S&T Leslie Madsen-Brooks History Janelle Brown EXPLORE Magazine Thanks to Boise State University College of Social Sciences and Public Affairs for funding. BACKGROUND: For at least forty years, women’s history scholars have investigated who is responsible for advances in science and technology. Their findings have dismantled assumptions that have excluded women’s scientific contributions. While the role of women in the history of science has been recovered, it is uncertain whether this information has made its way into the classroom and into cultural consciousness.
Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940
In volume one of this landmark study, focusing on developments up to 1940, Margaret Rossiter describes the activities and personalities of the numerous women scientists-astronomers, chemists, biologists, and psychologists-who overcame extraordinary obstacles to contribute to the growth of American science. This remarkable history recounts women's efforts to establish themselves as members of the scientific community and examines the forces that inhibited their active and visible participation in the sciences.
Fables: The Tortoise? The Hare? The Mathematically Underachieving Male?
This article reports on some results from an interview-based study with 70 practising research mathematicians, 35 women and 35 men, at universities in England, Scotland, Ireland and Northern Ireland. The aim of the study was to explore epistemologies of these mathematicians and any impact of them on how they conducted their professional lives. In this article, three conjectures are examined. The first was that career experiences would differ between females and males, as they indeed did. The second was that women would be differently distributed to men within the disciplinary areas, which was not the case. The third was that gender would have no effect on how these mathematicians understood and practised their discipline, which was the case. In the concluding section of the article, the findings are related to the learning of mathematics, particularly in schools, where the expressed heterogeneity of these mathematicians is replaced with an insistent drive towards homogeneity, and that homogeneity reflects...