We cheer on women in the sciences, but recruiting and retaining them is a different story
This week, the world was enchanted when the National Science Foundation released the first ever image of a black hole. Among the memes and debates and general excitement, people also turned the spotlight on Katie Bouman, the 29-year-old scientist who developed a crucial algorithm that helped produce the historic image.
Katie Bouman with the fully-rendered black hole image. It was a great moment for women in science. In fact, it's a great time for women in science as far as visibility is concerned.
NASA's 'Hidden Figures' transformed into Legos 00:57Then, of course, there's the memory of decades of hard-working STEM women that cascade backward from achievements like Bouman's. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab compared a photo of Bouman among stacks of hard drives to a famous 1969 photo of computer scientist Margaret Hamilton standing by the thousands of sheets of code she and her team wrote for the Apollo Project.
Right: MIT computer scientist Margaret Hamilton w/the code she wrote that helped put a man on the moon.— MIT CSAIL April 10, 2019 Yes, it's a great time for celebrating women in science. Unfortunately, research shows that women in STEM fields face persistent challenges and biases that limit their influence and growth, and may dissuade other women from pursuing STEM professions despite clear cultural encouragement at large.
Opening new doors to STEM for young women 05:59That's a pretty difficult nut to crack, and it may take more than the occasional female celebrity scientist to reverse. STEM organizations like the National Math and Science Foundation and NASA have tried to actively recruit and retain more women, but abundant research shows the gap in both representation and pay persists. In fact, in the field of computer science, there are actually less women represented than there were in the 1980s.
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