COLUMN | Women in STEM: The century-long battle with patriarchy
Bea Maranan Centuries have passed since the very first woman to enter a Science-focused university. Yet since then, the inequalities between men and women in Science remain.
Laura “Minerva” Bassi, also known as the goddess of wisdom, was the first woman to have a doctorate in Science. She was the first woman to have ever been elected to the prestigious university—Academy of Science of the Institute of Bologna.
The patriarchal ideas were set to stone, and allowing a woman to handle academics was a blasphemous sight at that time. During the 1700s, women were treated as inferior to men, and this would go on two more centuries later.
Bassi isn’t the only one who struggled because of her gender. Another story embarks and is probably the most notable of all. The other Einstein, Mileva Maric-Einstein. She was treated and then discarded like a piece of scratch paper, tainted with ink, crumpled, and then discarded. During her time at her university, she was harassed and physically assaulted by her male peers solely for being an intelligent woman. She then thought she found solace with her husband, Einstein, but then he would betray her and commit intellectual theft by taking out her name as an author on one of their co-authored theories on physics. She was helping him succeed, but he didn’t want to share any of the fame and respect with his wife. Mileva’s story is one of the many stories of women in Science who have been deprived of a safe environment to flourish as scientists. Even their basic human rights aren’t even met in their universities. Numerous female scientists didn’t get their credit for their discoveries because a man took it for himself. Amazing individuals like Rosalind Franklin, Ida Noddack, Lise Meitner, and Chien-Shiung Wu, just to name a few. Their story would go on and continue in the forms of different young women in Science until the present day. Although times have changed and things have become better for women in the workplace—better doesn’t mean things are great. The “Women in STEM” movement has helped quite a lot, with women standing up for one another and sharing their experiences fighting the patriarchy in their universities. As saddening as it is, violence against women does still exist, but now, women can speak up and defend themselves against harm. Organizations and fellow women stand up for one another. Times are indeed changing; centuries ago, a female scientist would be seen as a demonic prophecy sent by the gods, but now women have been dominating the science field. Love thy women in STEM.