Steminists.
I was referring to a correction paper in the recent issue of Chemical Reviews and following it around lazily, I came across this interesting and inspiring site for women scientists working at UC Berkeley.
Steminists
What I found particularly interesting is some examples of women who entered the university in non-science majors, and stumbled into science after taking a math class or something of that nature.
For example, here is the graduate student Rachel Woods-Robinson who is a third year graduate student in Applied Physics at UC Berkeley who entered ULCA as a college freshman hoping to major in playing the trombone.
Recently I had a conversation with a young woman who complained that during interviews for her admission to graduate school, people kept telling her that she was a strong candidate because she is a woman of color. She didn't think it was right, felt that she was privileged. (I happen to know that she was also privileged by coming from a wealthy family, but I didn't go there.)
(She shares ethnicity with 50% of our fabulous VP nominee.)
Being an old man - an old white man with a white wife and two white sons - I told her that we all have opportunities based on our backgrounds: My sons for instance got to go to better schools than my wife did - she went to an inner city school - and that was an "unfair" advantage for them.
We in this country are working to smooth out the obstacles before each of us, and if it was a little more difficult for my son to get into an engineering program than it was for some women of color because they are women of color, well, that evens things, doesn't it?
It is not why we have opportunities, I said, but what we do with them when we get them.
Anyway, it strikes me as wonderful that these young STEM students are celebrating being women STEM scientists.
We need more of this, not less of it.
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