4 POINTS

– The “Wu experiment” disproved conservation of parity: thought to be a law of nature.
– Worked on the Manhattan Project, and made significant contributions to radioactivity research.
– Was a fierce advocate of social justice in her later years.

Women are half of the population but hold only about a quarter of the science and engineering jobs in the US. As well, despite women receiving roughly half of the PhDs, they only hold less than a quarter of professorships.

“I didn’t succumb to the stereotype that science wasn’t for girls.”

Although there is still much work to be done, things are better than they used to be. For this, we owe a huge thanks to the trailblazing efforts of many women of STEM.

The Oxford Dictionary defines this as: The practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from under-represented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce.

Unfortunately, this happens a lot. Said Voltaire of Emilie du Chatelet (physicist and mathematician), “She was a great man whose only fault was being a woman.”