Good Morning! On this day, (Thursday) May 11 in 1906 Jaqueline Cochran was born. She was an American pilot and business executive. She pioneered women's aviation as one of the most prominent racing pilots of her generation. She set numerous records and broke the sound barrier.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who revolutionized our understanding of what stars & the Universe are made of, was born #OTD in 1900.
In 1926, she wrote what is considered the "undoubtedly most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".
She continued in the same spirit - only to be denied a professorship (or even the a proper astronomer position). She finally became a professor at Harvard at 1956(!) & first woman to chair a department.
"My designs were so deceptively simple that it was easy for people to assume I just had easy problems, whereas others, who made super-complicated designs (that were technically unsound and never worked) and were able to talk about them in ways that nobody understood, were considered geniuses." -- Radia Perlman, the woman who developed the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol, an innovation that made today's Internet possible.
Marie Curie's notebooks, which are radioactive and must be stored in a lead-lined box in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Curie’s corpse is also radioactive. Her coffin is lined in an inch of lead. Both will remain radioactive for 1,500+ years.
Are you a #WomanInTech with an interest in #FOSS? The #Pinetta project is looking for devs, designers, and community builders who are interested in contributing to a FOSS #ActivityPub project and shaping both community and technical frameworks. Give us a follow and a shout!
I'm just a girl, standing in front of a seminar speaker, asking him a question because no other women in the audience have their hands up.
The confidence gap is real and it sucks. So I’ve gotten into the habit of jotting down potential Qs during talks, and making sure I try to get one in, even if they all seem a bit underwhelming. I'm yet to profoundly embarrass myself.
We can and must do better, not only in the audience, but also as speakers and moderators.
Re-posting this 🐤 thread from 2018 which, sadly, is still relevant:
#WomenInSTEM who talk about #harassment and sexual misconduct get a lot of antagonistic & unhelpful replies. @shrewshrew and I (a woman & a man in science) tried to categorize them. #9ReplyGuys