International Day of Women and Girls in Science

Today is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, so we’ve got a bunch of content for the ladies out there. Let’s start with the statement Sima Bahous (the Executive Director of UN Women) made:

❝This year, the sixty-seventh session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW67) will consider as its priority theme “Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls”.

This is an unprecedented opportunity for the Commission to develop a definitive agenda for progress towards women’s full and equal participation and representation in STEM. Its implementation will require bold, coordinated, multi-stakeholder action.❞

Read Her Full Statement Here!

Here at 10almonds, we are just one newsletter, and maybe we can’t change the world (…yet), but we’re all for this!

We’re certainly all in favour of education in the digital age, and more of our subscribers are women and girls than not (highest of fives from your writer today, also a woman—and I do bring most of the sciency content).

Medical News Today asks “Why Are Women Less Likely To Survive Cardiac Arrest Than Men?”

You can read the full article here, but the short version is:

• People (bystanders and EMS professionals alike!) are less likely to intervene to give CPR when the patient is a woman (we appreciate that “your hands on an unknown woman’s chest” is a social taboo, but there’s a time and a place!)
• People trained to give CPR (volunteers or professionals!) are often less confident about how to do so with female anatomy—training is almost entirely on “male” dummies.

A quick take-away from this is: to give effective CPR, you need to be giving two-inch compressions!

On a side note, do you want to learn how to correctly do chest compressions on female anatomy? This short (1:55) video could save a woman’s life!

As a science-based health and productivity newsletter, we make no apologies if occasional issues sometimes have a slant to women’s health! Heaven help us, the bias in science at large is certainly the opposite:

The list of examples is far too long for us to include here, but two that spring immediately to mind are:

• PCOS (Polycystic ovary syndrome), which affects nearly 1 in 5 women, can lead to infertility, never mind the inconvenience of irregular bleeding, chronic pain, and diabetes (amongst other things), and… nobody knows what causes it, or what to do about it.
• Endometriosis (the lining of the womb starts growing in other places), meanwhile, affects around 1 in 10 women. It causes chronic pain and fatigue, and again, nobody knows what causes it or how to cure it.

Maybe if women in STEM weren’t on the receiving end of rampant systemic misogyny, we’d have more women in science, and some answers by now!

❗️NOT-SO-FUN FACT:

Women make up only 28% of the workforce in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), and men vastly outnumber women majoring in most STEM fields in college. The gender gaps are particularly high in some of the fastest-growing and highest-paid jobs of the future, like computer science and engineering.

Source: AAUW

The US census suggests change is happening, but is a very long way from equality!

WHAT OUR SUBSCRIBERS SAY:

❝Women are slowly gaining more of a place in academia, and slowly making more of a difference when they get there, and start doing research that reflects ourselves. But I still think that it’s a struggle to get there, and it’s a struggle to be heard and be respected.

It’s a matter of pride, it’s a matter of proving yourself, being in STEM, and [women in STEM] still report being extremely disrespected, not taken seriously all, despite being very very good.

It’s worth noting as well, that we’ve had women in STEM for a while and there are so many things we appreciate nowadays that they were a part of, but they were never given credit for—it’s still a problem today and something we need to more actively fight.❞

Isabella F. Lima, Occupational Psychologist

Are you a woman in STEM, and have a story to tell? We’d love to hear it! Just reply to this email 🙂