Recent Posts
Mentorship May 11, 2017
If you look closely at Entity’s #WomenThatDid section, you’ll notice one thing that almost all those amazing ladies have in common – they did not receive credit for their accomplishments.
Most of these women were able to step into a male-dominated field, fight to keep their place and eventually come out on top. In the end, however, they were pushed aside and not recognized as contributors to amazing inventions and discoveries. Lise Meitner, for example, was an Austrian physicist who made an extremely important discovery that paved the way for nuclear bombs to be built – unfortunately, only her male partners were given the Nobel Prize. Without Hedy Lamarr, a well-known actress known for her beauty, we wouldn’t have the programming for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or GPS – it took almost 50 years for her to be recognized and rewarded for her patent on Secret Communication Systems. Mavis Batey, Chien Shiung Wu and Vera Rubin are just three more of countless others in this group.
You may know of big names such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Susan B. Anthony and Gloria Steinem and their important work in the feminist movement. The most interesting ladies, though, are the ones with loud, unrecognizable voices that spoke out for women’s rights and made many “firsts” – Ching Shih, Mae Jamison, Lyudmila Paylichenko and Madam C.J. Walker to name a few.
Researching all these women who made strides in math and science, were sought out to decode enemy messages in WWII and became spies was not a chore at all. Discovering female astronauts and pirate lords no one has ever heard of was time-consuming, but definitely rewarding in the long run.
If I learned one thing from writing on these women, it’s that if they could do all these amazing things in the 20th century and even long before that, there’s no excuse for me not to try now.
