Women in STEM

Posted On October 26, 2020

By BLD

Who do you picture when you picture a scientist? I picture Albert Einstein. He is, in my mind, the scientist. The stereotype for a long time has been that a scientist is a white man in a white coat. This is despite the fact that we have (hopefully) over the course of our lives also heard of Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin and other female scientists! 

I’m asking this question because I recently watched a new documentary called “Picture a Scientist” directed by Sharon Shattuck and Ian Cheney. The documentary follows three women who tell stories of their education and careers in the fields of molecular biology, analytical chemistry and geomorphology. Their stories highlight in particular the sex-based discrimination that they have all confronted in academia on the way to becoming professors in their respective fields. While watching the doc, I felt shock, disgust, anger and sadness at hearing such blatant stories of sexism and the horrible repercussions these acts had and continue to have on the lives and careers of these women. 

Although I’ve heard over and over again that women and people of colour are often astoundingly underrepresented in STEM (i.e. science, technology, engineering, mathematics), I was wondering if that is still the case in a country like Canada, so I dove into the statistics and made a little infographic to share what I found out. In the future, as a follow up to this topic, I would like to explore why it is that we see, in Canada and other countries, a persistent underrepresentation of women studying and working in the STEM fields. And the follow up question to that follow up question is, what can we do to change this?