Girls and Science

This is the translation of an article written by Ferran Ruiz Tarragó. I just translated it to make it available to a larger audience. See below the original version in Catalan.

685 men and 7 women have their own name in the index of the illustrated history of world science by Colin Ronan published by the University of Cambridge. A woman and 29 men shine in the stellar moments of the science of Isaac Asimov. Of the 68 biographical characters in the "wise illustrious" section of Tecnirama (an ancient science and technology informative encyclopedia) neither a single is a woman. They are extracted data of works that I have at home. Great names of classical science like Archimedes, Ptolemy, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Maxwell, Mendel, Bohr, Pasteur, Cajal, Fleming or Einstein are men. Manya Sklodowska (Marie Curie) is the only outstanding exception. The historic cultural, social and political decline of women prevented its incorporation into the world of scientific thought and damaged the expansion of brilliant intelligences. Rita Levi-Montalcini, an Italian neurologist, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine in 1986 for the discovery of the protein that stimulates the growth of nerve fibers - says it clearly: "For thousands of years, female members could not use their own natural intellectual qualities, because man, relying on a greater physical strength and supposed mental superiority, prevented his access to power and culture. " The artificial barriers to women have also hampered the public recognition of their contributions. Let's mention a couple of quite eloquent examples related to the Nobel Prize in Physics. Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner directed the small group of scientists who discovered the fission of uranium by neutron bombing in 1939. The award went exclusively to Hahn. The astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered and analysed the pulsars in 1967 but his name was not even mentioned in the concession award to his thesis director in 1974. Since 1901, 201 men and 3 women have received the Nobel Prize in Physics: Marie Curie for their studies on radioactivity in 1903; Maria Goeppert-Mayer, an American citizen of German origin, received it in 1963 for research into the internal structure of the atomic nucleus; And, just now, October 2018, Canadian Donna Strickland has been awarded her work in laser physics. Fortunately, thanks to the Internet, we can know previously unknown biographies of scientific women who worked isolated and silent and who suffered humiliations because of their originality and intellectual appetite. Fortunately, today's times are quite different. Many women work in scientific and technical work at many levels, including those with high responsibility, such as Fabiola Gianotti, director of CERN. In spite of this positive advance, its number is still minority and in the fields of technology and engineering the proportion of women is much lower than that of men. Too often the girls are dominated by gender stereotypes and think that these professions are little "feminine" or that their ability in these areas is less than that of boys. Insecurity and guidance deficits also help to choose to address other fields. Today, many instances of our society have the common objective of promoting the inclusive gender perspective and stimulating the incorporation of girls into studies related to science and technology. To attract more girls to the scientific and technical careers a variety of performances are carried out. There are international conferences dedicated to women and science, expert congresses, debates and contests are held, videos are published that describe experiences and elaborate explanatory materials, lectures have been extended to students on access to these studies and even advertising campaigns are carried out, always with the aim of generating positive stimuli among girls, and, by extension, their male partners, teachers, counselors and families. Very relevant are the "live" presentations where women with scientific and technical work describe their professional experience, explain experiences and projects, talk with girls and, by way of example, make it clear that women can enjoy a rich professional life and satisfactory in the scientific-technical field. These actions (especially facilitating contact with women who are professionally engaged) are meritorious, opportune and possibly successful. However, it must be kept in mind that they are inevitably only a small fraction of the avalanche of peremptory, contradictory and powerful stimuli that demand the attention of young people.

 What worries me is that the socially shared interest for the rise of female vocations in the field of science and technology is unleashed in their teaching, or at least that is the feeling I have. I do not see anyone saying openly that the key for more girls to be inclined by science as a professional option is the improvement of their education. And if this improvement is to have some role, then it seems natural to think that it should be used for all students, whether they are girls or they are boys. It seems that we want to avoid the utopia of trying to improve the learning of sciences with the simple solution of developing a package of measures of dissemination, propaganda and public relations. In short, the question of "science and girls" must be transferred to the field of teaching improvement, how to make learning more beneficial and attractive. I am not very aware of this subject, but I prefer sinful recklessness and raise the essential point: increasing the vocation for science demands that scientific education give more importance to the experimental part. In a word: it is high time that, in general, the learning of sciences is true to its full name, experimental sciences, with all that implies.

 Ferran Ruiz Tarragó