In December of this year, my dear baby sister Alana will have completed her Master’s in Electrical Engineering. She has further plans to pursue her studies at a university in Singapore to be closer to home, so she can achieve her dream of earning a PhD before the age of thirty. She has about six years until that happens, and you KNOW I will be rooting the loudest for that to happen!
Watching Alana’s career in engineering and scientific research, one thing has always bothered me: in plenty of her academic and work-related photos, she is often the only woman snapped in a photographic frame full of men. This speaks volumes, I think, about the skewed ratio of men to women in science. Yes, there are some fields of scientific study which count more women than men among their ranks (eg. biology), but overall, male scientists outnumber their female counterparts three to one. Bill Nye, an American national treasure and one of my personal heroes, has been quoted as saying “One half of the humans are female, so one half of the scientists should be female.” (more…)
