10 women who changed the world but are still not well-known enough by Olha Korniienko

10 Olha Korniienko

women who changed

the world* *but are still not well-known enough

Olha Korniienko

10 women who changed the world* *but are still not well-known enough

Kyiv Alveola 2018

UDC 992 O22

O22

O. Korniienko 10 women who changed the world but are still not well-known enough. — Kyiv : Alveola, 2018. — 52 p.

Women have contributed an unbelievable amount of knowledge, discovery, and talent in every field throughout history. Unfortunately, each and every woman doesn’t get the credit and worldwide recognition they deserve. Seriously— you could help found a nation or discover a piece of the human anatomy and still get left in the dust, which is why Women’s History Month is the perfect time to reflect on some of the lesser-known heroes out there. These women haven’t become household names (yet!), but everyone should know their incredible contributions. UDC 992

To all the women of the world

contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Rosalind Franklin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Amelia Earhart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Katherine Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Martha Gellhorn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Helen Keller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24 Hedy Lamarr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 Margaret Hamilton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Shirley Chisholm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36 Hoda Shaarawy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Grace Hopper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48

introduction Why are women less self-assured than men? Why does so much research point to the fact that while women have just as much talent and ability as men to make it, they all-too-often lack confidence when it comes to their careers. This lack of self-belief is something that I can all too well sympathise with. While outwardly chatty and confident with friends and family, in the workplace and at networking events, I often find myself questioning why anyone would want to talk with me and whether what I have to say is interesting enough. Take today, I stood right next to the broadcaster Jon Snow (C4â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s News Anchor) and failed miserably to rustle up a conversation to thank him for chairing a thought-provoking panel session I had just listened to. What I was concerned about, I am not too sure, but something stopped me, despite the fact that I had been happily tweeting comments throughout the conference. Like many young women, throughout school and university I had been taught to keep my head down, work hard and play by the rules, certain that if I adhered to this, somehow my talent and efforts would be rewarded. And while at school and university such an approach served me well, when I stepped into the outside world I soon learnt that success, no matter how hard you work comes with no guarantee. And just because you work 16 hours a day, diligently go beyond your daily tasks and excel in every one, this does not mean that youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be recognised for your achievements.

Rosalind Franklin 10

osalind Elsie Franklin (25 July 1920 – 16 April 1958) was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer who made contributions to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), RNA (ribonucleic acid), viruses, coal, and graphite. Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely recognised posthumously. Born to a prominent British Jewish family, Franklin was educated at a private day school at Norland Place in West London, Lindores School for Young Ladies in Sussex, and St Paul’s Girls’ School, London. Then she studied the Natural Sciences Tripos at Newnham College, Cambridge, from which she graduated in 1941. Earning a research fellowship, she joined the University

“In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall succeed in our aims: the improvement of mankind.”

of Cambridge physical chemistry laboratory under Ronald George Wreyford Norrish, who disappointed her for his lack of enthusiasm. The British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA) offered her a research position in 1942, and started her work on coals. This helped her earn a Ph.D. in 1945. She went to Paris in 1947 as a chercheur (post-doctoral researcher) under Jacques Mering at the Laboratoire Central des Services Chimiques de l’Etat, where she became an accomplished X-ray crystallographer. She became a research associate at King’s College London in 1951 and worked on X-ray diffraction studies, which would eventually facilitate the double helix theory of the DNA. In 1953, after two years, owing to disagreement with her director John Randall and more so with her colleague Maurice Wilkins, she was compelled to move to Birkbeck College.At Birkbeck, John Desmond Bernal, chair of the physics department, offered her a separate research team. She died in 1958 at the age of 37 of ovarian cancer. Franklin is best known for her work on the X-ray diffraction images of DNA, particularly Photo 51, while at King’s College London, which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix for which James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962. Watson suggested that Franklin would have ideally been awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Wilkins, but, although there was not yet a rule against posthumous awards, the Nobel Committee generally does not make posthumous nominations. After finishing her work on DNA, Franklin led pioneering work at Birkbeck on the molecular structures of viruses. Her team member Aaron Klug continued her research, winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1982. Franklin was never nominated for a Nobel Prize. Her work was a crucial part in the discovery of DNA’s structure, which along with subsequent related work led to Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins being awarded a Nobel Prize in 1962.She had died in 1958, and during her lifetime the DNA structure was not considered as fully proven. It took Wilkins and his colleagues about seven years to collect enough data to

prove and refine the proposed DNA structure. Moreover, its biological significance, as proposed by Watson and Crick, was not established. General acceptance for the DNA double helix and its function did not start until late in the 1950s, leading to Nobel nominations in 1960, 1961, and 1962 for Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, and in 1962 for Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The first breakthrough was from Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl in 1958, who experimentally showed the DNA replication of a bacterium Escherichia coli.Now known as Meselson–Stahl experiment, DNA was found to replicate into two double-stranded helices, with each helix having one of the original DNA strands. This DNA replication was firmly established by 1961 after further demonstration in other species,and of the stepwise chemical reaction. According to the 1961 Crick–Monod letter, this experimental proof, along with Wilkins having initiated the DNA diffraction work, were the reasons why Crick felt that Wilkins should be included in the DNA Nobel Prize. In 1962 the Nobel Prize was subsequently awarded to Crick, Watson, and Wilkins. Nobel rules prohibit posthumous nominations or splitting of Prizes more than three ways. The award was for their body of work on nucleic acids and not exclusively for the discovery of the structure of DNA. By the time of the award Wilkins had been working on the structure of DNA for more than 10 years, and had done much to confirm the Watson–Crick model.Crick had been working on the genetic code at Cambridge and Watson had worked on RNA for some years.Watson has suggested that ideally Wilkins and Franklin would have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Aaron Klug, Franklin’s colleague and principal beneficiary in her will, was the sole winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1982, «for his development of crystallographic electron microscopy and his structural elucidation of biologically important nucleic acid-protein complexes.». This work was exactly what Franklin had started and which she introduced to Klug, and it is highly plausible that, were she alive, she would have shared the Nobel Prize.

“Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated.”

melia Mary Earhart (born July 24, 1897; disappeared July 2, 1937) was an American aviation pioneer and author. Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.She received the United States Distinguished Flying Cross for this accomplishment.She set many other records, wrote best-selling books about her flying experiences and was instrumental in the formation of The Ninety-Nines, an organization for female pilots. In 1935, Earhart became a visiting faculty member at Purdue University as an advisor to aeronautical engineering and a career counselor to women students. She was also a member of the National Womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Party and an early supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment. During an attempt to make a circumnavigational flight of the globe in 1937 in a Purdue-funded Lockheed Model 10-E Electra, Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared over the central Pacific Ocean near Howland Island. Fascination with her life, career, and disappearance continues to this day. 14

Amelia Earhart 15

“Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?”

Throughout the early 1920s, following a disastrous investment in a failed gypsum mine, Earhart’s inheritance from her grandmother, which was now administered by her mother, steadily diminished until it was exhausted. Consequently, with no immediate prospects for recouping her investment in flying, Earhart sold the «Canary» as well as a second Kinner and bought a yellow Kissel «Speedster» twopassenger automobile, which she named the «Yellow Peril». Simultaneously, Earhart experienced an exacerbation of her old sinus problem as her pain worsened and in early 1924 she was hospitalized for another sinus operation, which was again unsuccessful. After trying her hand at a number of unusual ventures that included setting up a photography company, Earhart set out in a new direction. Following her parents’ divorce in 1924, she drove her mother in the «Yellow Peril» on a transcontinental trip from California with stops throughout the West and even a jaunt up to Banff, Alberta. The meandering tour eventually brought the pair to Boston, Massachusetts, where Earhart underwent another sinus operation which was more successful. After recuperation, she returned to Columbia University for several months but was forced to abandon her studies and any further plans for enrolling at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, because her mother could no longer afford the tuition fees and associated costs. Soon after, she found employment first as a teacher, then as a social worker in 1925 at Denison House, a Boston settlement house.At this time, she lived in Medford, Massachusetts. When Earhart lived in Medford, she maintained her interest in aviation, becoming a member of the American Aeronautical Society’s Boston chapter and was eventually elected its vice president. She flew out of Dennison Airport (later the Naval Air Station Squantum) in Quincy, Massachusetts, and helped finance its operation by investing a small sum of money. Earhart also flew the first official flight out of Dennison Airport in 1927. Along with acting as a sales representative for Kinner aircraft in the Boston area, Earhart wrote local newspaper columns promoting flying and as her local celebrity grew, she laid out the plans for an organization devoted to female flyers.

After Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927, Amy Guest (1873–1959) expressed interest in being the first woman to fly (or be flown) across the Atlantic Ocean. After deciding that the trip was too perilous for her to undertake, she offered to sponsor the project, suggesting that they find «another girl with the right image». While at work one afternoon in April 1928, Earhart got a phone call from Capt. Hilton H. Railey, who asked her, «Would you like to fly the Atlantic?» The project coordinators (including book publisher and publicist George P. Putnam) interviewed Earhart and asked her to accompany pilot Wilmer Stultz and copilot/mechanic Louis Gordon on the flight, nominally as a passenger, but with the added duty of keeping the flight log. The team departed from Trepassey Harbor, Newfoundland, in a Fokker F.VIIb/3m on June 17, 1928, landing at Pwll near Burry Port, South Wales, exactly 20 hours and 40 minutes later. There is a commemorative blue plaque at the site. Since most of the flight was on instruments and Earhart had no training for this type of flying, she did not pilot the aircraft. When interviewed after landing, she said, «Stultz did all the flying—had to. I was just baggage, like a sack of potatoes.» She added, «... maybe someday I’ll try it alone.» Earhart reportedly received a rousing welcome on June 19, 1928, when she landed at Woolston in Southampton, England. She flew the Avro Avian 594 Avian III, SN: R3/AV/101 owned by Lady Mary Heath and later purchased the aircraft and had it shipped back to the United States (where it was assigned «unlicensed aircraft identification mark» 7083). When the Stultz, Gordon and Earhart flight crew returned to the United States, they were greeted with a ticker-tape parade along the Canyon of Heroes in Manhattan, followed by a reception with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House. In probate court in Los Angeles, Putnam requested to have the «declared death in absentia» seven-year waiting period waived so that he could manage Earhart’s finances. As a result, Earhart was declared legally dead on January 5, 1939.

“There’s more to life than being a passenger.”

“Never interrupt someone doing something you said couldn’t be done.”

Katherine Johnson 18

atherine Coleman Goble Johnson (born Augustâ&#x20AC;Ż 26, 1918) is an African-American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics as a NASA employee were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. manned spaceflights. During her 35-year career at NASA and its predecessor, she earned a reputation for mastering complex manual calculations and helped the space agency pioneer the use of computers to perform the tasks. Johnsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work included calculating trajectories, launch windows and emergency return paths for Project Mercury spaceflights, including those of astronauts Alan Shepard, the first American in space, and John Glenn, the first American in orbit, and rendezvous paths for the Apollo lunar lander and command module on flights to the Moon.Her calculations were also essential to the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, and she worked on plans for a mission to Mars. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded Johnson the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 19

“I was just excited to have challenging work to do and smart people to work with.”

Johnson decided on a career as a research mathematician, although this was a difficult field for African Americans and women to enter. The first jobs she found were in teaching. At a family gathering in 1952 a relative mentioned that the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was hiring mathematicians. (It was superseded by the agency NASA in 1958.) At the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, based in Hampton, Virginia, near Langley Field, NACA hired African-American mathematicians as well as whites for their Guidance and Navigation Department. Johnson was offered a job in 1953. She accepted and became part of the early NASA team. According to an oral history archived by the National Visionary Leadership Project: «At first she [Johnson] worked in a pool of women performing math calculations. Katherine has referred to the women in the pool as virtual «computers who wore skirts». Their main job was to read the data from the black boxes of planes and carry out other precise mathematical tasks. Then one day, Katherine (and a colleague) were temporarily assigned to help the all-male flight research team. Katherine’s knowledge of analytic geometry helped make quick allies of male bosses and colleagues to the extent that, «they forgot to return me to the pool». While the racial and gender barriers were always there, Katherine says she ignored them. Katherine was assertive, asking to be included in editorial meetings (where no women had gone before). She simply told people she had done the work and that she belonged.» From 1953 to 1958, Johnson worked as a «computer», analyzing topics such as gust alleviation for aircraft. Originally assigned to the West Area Computers section supervised by mathematician Dorothy Vaughan, Johnson was reassigned to the Guidance and Control Division of Langley’s Flight Research Division. It was staffed by white male engineers. In keeping with state racial segregation laws, and federal workplace segregation introduced under President Woodrow Wilson in the early 20th century, Johnson and the other AfricanAmerican women in the computing pool were required to work, eat, and use restrooms that were separate from those of their

white peers. Their office was labeled as «Colored Computers». In an interview with WHRO-TV, Johnson stated that she «didn’t feel the segregation at NASA, because everybody there was doing research. You had a mission and you worked on it, and it was important to you to do your job ... and play bridge at lunch.» She added: «I didn’t feel any segregation. I knew it was there, but I didn’t feel it.» NACA disbanded the colored computing pool in 1958 when it was superseded by NASA, which adopted digital computers. Although the installation was desegregated, forms of discrimination were still pervasive. Johnson recalled that era: «We needed to be assertive as women in those days — assertive and aggressive — and the degree to which we had to be that way depended on where you were. I had to be. In the early days of NASA women were not allowed to put their names on the reports — no woman in my division had had her name on a report. I was working with Ted Skopinski and he wanted to leave and go to Houston ... but Henry Pearson, our supervisor — he was not a fan of women — kept pushing him to finish the report we were working on. Finally, Ted told him, «Katherine should finish the report, she’s done most of the work anyway.» So Ted left Pearson with no choice; I finished the report and my name went on it, and that was the first time a woman in our division had her name on something.» From 1958 until her retirement in 1986, Johnson worked as an aerospace technologist, moving during her career to the Spacecraft Controls Branch. She calculated the trajectory for the May 5, 1961 space flight of Alan Shepard, the first American in space. She also calculated the launch window for his 1961 Mercury mission. She plotted backup navigation charts for astronauts in case of electronic failures. When NASA used electronic computers for the first time to calculate John Glenn’s orbit around Earth, officials called on Johnson to verify the computer’s numbers; Glenn had asked for her specifically and had refused to fly unless Johnson verified the calculations. Johnson later worked directly with digital computers. Her ability and reputation for accuracy helped to establish confidence in the new technology.

“I like to learn. That’s an art and a science.”

artha Ellis Gellhorn (November 8, 1908 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; February 15, 1998) was an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist who is considered one of the great war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. Gellhorn was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945. Gellhorn was born on November 8, 1908, in St. Louis, Missouri, the daughter of Edna Fischel Gellhorn, a suffragist, and George Gellhorn, a German-born gynecologist. Her father and maternal grandfather were Jewish, and her maternal grandmother came from a Protestant family. Her brother Walter became a noted law professor at Columbia University, and her younger brother Alfred was an oncologist and former dean of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Martha Gellhorn 23

“It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.”

At the 1916 national Democratic convention in St. Louis, «The Golden Lane» represented thousands of women carrying yellow parasols and wearing yellow sashes lined both sides leading to the Coliseum. A tableau of the states was in front of the Art Museum; states who had not enfranchised women were draped in black. In the front row were two little girls, Mary Taussig and Martha Gellhorn, representing future voters. Gellhorn graduated in 1926 from John Burroughs School in St. Louis, and enrolled in Bryn Mawr College, several miles outside Philadelphia. In 1927, she left, without having graduated, to pursue a career as a journalist. Her first published articles appeared in The New Republic. In 1930, determined to become a foreign correspondent, she went to France for two years, where she worked at the United Press bureau in Paris. While in Europe, she became active in the pacifist movement, writing about her experiences in her book What Mad Pursuit (1934). After returning to the United States,Gellhorn was hired by Harry Hopkins, whom she had met through her friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, as a field investigator for the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), created by Franklin D. Roosevelt to aid in the war on the Great Depression. Gellhorn traveled around the United States for FERA to report on the impact of the Depression on the country. She first went to Gastonia, North Carolina, where she used her observation and communication skills to report on how the people of that town were affected by the Depression. Later, she worked with Dorothea Lange, a photographer, to document the everyday lives of the hungry and homeless. Their reports later became part of the official government files for the Great Depression. They were able to investigate topics that were not usually open to women of the 1930s, which made Gellhorn, as well as Lange, major contributors to American history. Her findings were the basis of a collection of short stories, The Trouble I’ve Seen (1936). Gellhorn first met Ernest Hemingway during a 1936 Christmas family trip to Key West, Florida. They agreed to travel to Spain together to cover the Spanish Civil War, where

Gellhorn had been hired to report for Collier’s Weekly. The pair celebrated Christmas of 1937 together in Barcelona. Later, from Germany, she reported on the rise of Adolf Hitler. In the spring of 1938 (months before the Munich Agreement), she was in Czechoslovakia. After the outbreak of World War II, she described these events in the novel A Stricken Field (1940). She later reported the war from Finland, Hong Kong, Burma, Singapore, and England. Lacking official press credentials to witness the Normandy landings, she hid in a hospital ship bathroom, and upon landing impersonated a stretcher bearer; she later recalled, «I followed the war wherever I could reach it.» She was the only woman to land at Normandy on D-Day on June 6, 1944. She was also among the first journalists to report from Dachau concentration camp after it was liberated by US troops on April 29, 1945. After the war, Gellhorn worked for the Atlantic Monthly, covering the Vietnam War and the Arab-Israel conflicts in the 1960s and 70s. She passed her 70th birthday in 1979, but continued working in the following decade, covering the civil wars in Central America. As she approached 80, Gellhorn began to slow down physically and although she still managed to cover the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989, she finally retired from journalism as the 1990s began. An operation for cataracts was unsuccessful and left her with permanently impaired vision. Gellhorn announced that she was «too old» to cover the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s. Although she did manage one last overseas trip to Brazil in 1995 to report on poverty in that country, which was published in the literary journal Granta. This last feat was accomplished with great difficulty as Gellhorn’s eyesight was failing, and she could not read her own manuscripts. Gellhorn published numerous books, including a collection of articles on war, The Face of War (1959); The Lowest Trees Have Tops (1967), a novel about McCarthyism; an account of her travels (including one trip with Hemingway), Travels with Myself and Another (1978); and a collection of her peacetime journalism, The View from the Ground (1988). Peripatetic by nature, Gellhorn reckoned that in a 40-year span of her life, she had created homes in 19 different locales.

“Citizenship is a tough occupation which obliges the citizen to make his own informed opinion and stand by it.”

Helen Keller 26

elen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June  1, 1968) was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a bachelor of arts degree. The story of Keller and her teacher, Anne Sullivan, was made famous by Keller’s autobiography, The Story of My Life, and its adaptations for film and stage, The Miracle Worker. Her birthplace in West Tuscumbia, Alabama, is now a museum and sponsors an annual «Helen Keller Day». Her June 27 birthday is commemorated as Helen Keller Day in Pennsylvania and, in the centenary year of her birth, was recognized by a presidential proclamation from Jimmy Carter. A prolific author, Keller was well-traveled and outspoken in her convictions. A member of the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World, she campaigned for women’s suffrage, labor rights, socialism, antimilitarism, and other similar causes. She was inducted into the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame in 1971 and was one of twelve inaugural inductees to the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame on June 8, 2015. 27

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.”

“Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.”

Helen Adams Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama. Her family lived on a homestead, Ivy Green, that Helen’s grandfather had built decades earlier. She had four siblings; two full siblings, Mildred Campbell (Keller) Tyson and Phillip Brooks Keller, and two older half-brothers from her father’s prior marriage, James McDonald Keller and William Simpson Keller. Her father, Arthur Henley Keller (1836–1896),spent many years as an editor of the Tuscumbia North Alabamian and had served as a captain in the Confederate Army. Her mother, Catherine Everett (Adams) Keller (1856–1921), known as «Kate»,was the daughter of Charles W. Adams, a Confederate general.Her paternal lineage was traced to Casper Keller, a native of Switzerland.One of Helen’s Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Keller reflected on this coincidence in her first autobiography, stating «that there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.» At 19 months old Keller contracted an unknown illness described by doctors as «an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain» which might have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness left her both deaf and blind. She lived, as she recalled in her autobiography “at sea in a dense fog.” At that time, Keller was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, the six-year-old daughter of the family cook, who understood her signs; by the age of seven, Keller had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family. Even though blind and deaf, Helen Keller had passed through many obstacles and she learned to live with her disabilities. She learned how to tell which person was walking from the vibrations of their footsteps. In 1886, Keller’s mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens’ American Notes of the successful education of another deaf and blind woman, Laura Bridgman, dispatched the young Keller, accompanied by her father, to seek out physician J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them to contact the

Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated, which was then located in South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school’s director, asked 20-year-old former student Anne Sullivan, herself visually impaired, to become Keller’s instructor. It was the beginning of a 49-yearlong relationship during which Sullivan evolved into Keller’s governess and eventually her companion. Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities, amid numerous other causes. The Deaf community was widely impacted by her. She traveled to twenty-five different countries giving motivational speeches about Deaf people’s conditions. She was a suffragette, pacifist, radical socialist, birth control supporter, and opponent of Woodrow Wilson. In 1915 she and George A. Kessler founded the Helen Keller International (HKI) organization. This organization is devoted to research in vision, health and nutrition. In 1920, she helped to found the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Keller traveled to over 40 countries with Sullivan, making several trips to Japan and becoming a favorite of the Japanese people. Keller met every U.S. President from Grover Cleveland to Lyndon B. Johnson and was friends with many famous figures, including Alexander Graham Bell, Charlie Chaplin and Mark Twain. Keller and Twain were both considered radicals at the beginning of the 20th century, and as a consequence, their political views have been forgotten or glossed over in the popular mind. Keller was a member of the Socialist Party and actively campaigned and wrote in support of the working class from 1909 to 1921. Many of her speeches and writings were about women’s right to vote and the impacts of war; in addition, she supported causes that opposed military intervention. She had speech therapy in order to have her voice heard better by the public. When the Rockefeller-owned press refused to print her articles, she protested until her work was finally published.She supported Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs in each of his campaigns for the presidency. Before reading Progress and Poverty, Helen Keller was already a socialist who believed that Georgism was a good step in the right direction.

“Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows.”

edy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, November 9, 1914 – January 19, 2000) was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor. Lamarr was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in 1914 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, the only child of Gertrud «Trude» Kiesler (née Lichtwitz; 1894–1977) and Emil Kiesler (1880–1935). Her father was born to a Jewish family in Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine) and was a successful bank director. Trude, her mother, a pianist and Budapest native, had come from an upper-class Jewish family. She had converted to Catholicism and was described as a «practicing Christian» who raised her daughter as a Christian. Lamarr helped get her mother out of Austria after it had been absorbed by the Third Reich and to the United States, where Gertrude later became an American citizen. She put «Hebrew» as her race on her petition for naturalization, which was a term often used in Europe.

Hedy Lamarr 31

“Analysis gave me great freedom of emotions and fantastic confidence. I felt I had served my time as a puppet.”

As a child, Lamarr showed an interest in acting and was fascinated by theatre and film. At the age of 12, she won a beauty contest in Vienna. At the beginning of World War II, she and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. Although Lamarr had no formal training and was primarily self-taught, she worked in her spare time on various hobbies and inventions, which included an improved traffic stoplight and a tablet that would dissolve in water to create a carbonated drink. The beverage was unsuccessful; Lamarr herself said it tasted like Alka-Seltzer. Among the few who knew of Lamarr’s inventiveness was aviation tycoon Howard Hughes. She suggested he change the rather square design of his aeroplanes (which she thought looked too slow) to a more streamlined shape, based on pictures of the fastest birds and fish she could find. Lamarr discussed her relationship with Hughes during an interview, saying that while they dated, he actively supported her «tinkering» hobbies. He put his team of scientists and engineers at her disposal, saying they would do or make anything she asked for. During World War II, Lamarr learned that radiocontrolled torpedoes, an emerging technology in naval war, could easily be jammed and set off course.She thought of creating a frequency-hopping signal that could not be tracked or jammed. She contacted her friend, composer and pianist George Antheil, to help her develop a device for doing that, and he succeeded by synchronizing a miniaturized playerpiano mechanism with radio signals. They drafted designs for the frequency-hopping system, which they patented.Antheil recalled: «We began talking about the war, which, in the late summer of 1940, was looking most extremely black. Hedy said that

she did not feel very comfortable, sitting there in Hollywood and making lots of money when things were in such a state. She said that she knew a good deal about munitions and various secret weapons ... and that she was thinking seriously of quitting MGM and going to Washington, DC, to offer her services to the newly established Inventors’ Council.» Their invention was granted a patent under US Patent 2,292,387 on August 11, 1942 (filed using her married name Hedy Kiesler Markey). However, it was technologically difficult to implement, and at that time the U.S. Navy was not receptive to considering inventions coming from outside the military. In 1962, (at the time of the Cuban missile crisis), an updated version of their design at last appeared on Navy ships. In 1997, Lamarr and Antheil received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award and the Bulbie Gnass Spirit of Achievement Bronze Award, given to individuals whose creative lifetime achievements in the arts, sciences, business, or invention fields have significantly contributed to society. Lamarr was featured on the Science Channel and the Discovery Channel. In 2014, Lamarr and Antheil were posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Lamarr became a naturalized citizen of the United States at age 38 on April 10, 1953. Her autobiography, Ecstasy and Me, was published in 1966, although she said on TV that it was not written by her, and much of it was fictional. Lamarr later sued the publisher, saying that many details were fabricated by its ghost writer, Leo Guild.Lamarr, in turn, was sued by Gene Ringgold, who asserted that the book plagiarized material from an article he had written in 1965 for Screen Facts magazine. In 1966, Lamarr was arrested in Los Angeles for shoplifting. The charges were eventually dropped. In 1991, she was arrested on the same charge in Florida, this time for stealing $21.48 worth of laxatives and eye drops. She pleaded no contest to avoid a court appearance, and the charges were dropped in return for her promise to refrain from breaking any laws for a year. The shoplifting charges coincided with a failed attempt to return to the screen.

“I don’t fear death because I don’t fear anything I don’t understand. When I start to think about it, I order a massage and it goes away.”

Margaret Hamilton 34

argaret Heafield Hamilton (born on August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She is credited with coining the term «software engineering». Hamilton was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design. Hamilton has published over 130 papers, proceedings, and reports about the 60 projects and six major programs in which she has been involved. On November 22, 2016, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by U.S. President Barack Obama for her work leading the development of onboard flight software for NASA’s Apollo Moon missions. 35

“It is always great when people take interest in your work.”

Margaret Heafield was born in Paoli, Indiana, to Kenneth Heafield and Ruth Esther Heafield (née Partington). After graduating from Hancock High School in 1954, she studied mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1955 and earned a B.A. in mathematics with a minor in philosophy from Earlham College in 1958. She briefly taught high school mathematics and French upon graduation, in order to support her husband while he worked on his undergraduate degree at Harvard, with the ultimate goal of pursuing a graduate degree at a later time. She moved to Boston, Massachusetts, with the intention of doing graduate study in abstract mathematics at Brandeis University. She cites a female math professor as helping her desire to pursue abstract mathematics. She had other inspirations outside the technological world, including her father, the philosopher and poet, and her grandfather, a school headmaster and Quaker Minister. She says these men inspired her to a minor in philosophy. In 1960 she took an interim position at MIT to develop software for predicting weather on the LGP-30 and the PDP-1 computers (at Marvin Minsky’s Project MAC) for professor Edward Norton Lorenz in the meteorology department. Hamilton wrote that at that time, computer science and software engineering were not yet disciplines; instead, programmers learned on the job with hands-on experience. From 1961 to 1963, she worked on the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE) Project at Lincoln Lab, where she was one of the programmers who wrote software for the first AN/FSQ-7 computer (the XD-1), to search for unfriendly aircraft; she also wrote software for the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories. The SAGE Project was an extension of Project Whirlwind, started by MIT, to create a computer system that could predict weather systems and track their movements through simulators; SAGE was soon developed for military use in antiaircraft air defense from potential Soviet attacks during the Cold War. Hamilton said, What they used to do when you came into this organization as a beginner, was to assign you this program which nobody was able to ever figure out or get to run. When I was the

beginner they gave it to me as well. And what had happened was it was tricky programming, and the person who wrote it took delight in the fact that all of his comments were in Greek and Latin. So I was assigned this program and I actually got it to work. It even printed out its answers in Latin and Greek. I was the first one to get it to work. It was her efforts on this project that made her a candidate for the position at NASA as the lead developer for Apollo flight software. Hamilton then joined the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory at MIT, which at the time was working on the Apollo space mission. She eventually led a team credited with developing the software for Apollo and Skylab. Hamilton’s team was responsible for developing in-flight software, which included algorithms designed by various senior scientists for the Apollo command module, lunar lander, and the subsequent Skylab. Another part of her team designed and developed the systems software which included the error detection and recovery software such as restarts and the Display Interface Routines (AKA the Priority Displays) which Hamilton designed and developed. She worked to gain hands-on experience during a time when computer science courses were uncommon and software engineering courses did not exist. Her areas of expertise include systems design and software development, enterprise and process modelling, development paradigm, formal systems modeling languages, systemoriented objects for systems modelling and development, automated life-cycle environments, methods for maximizing software reliability and reuse, domain analysis, correctness by built-in language properties, open-architecture techniques for robust systems, full life-cycle automation, quality assurance, seamless integration, error detection and recovery techniques, man-machine interface systems, operating systems, end-toend testing techniques, and life-cycle management techniques. In one of the critical moments of the Apollo 11 mission, the Apollo Guidance Computer together with the on-board flight software averted an abort of the landing on the Moon. Three minutes before the Lunar lander reached the Moon’s surface, several computer alarms were triggered.

“Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world. There was no choice but to be pioneers; no time to be beginners.”

hirley Anita Chisholm (née St. Hill; November 30, 1924 – January 1, 2005) was an American politician, educator, and author. In 1968, she became the first black woman elected to the United States Congress, and she represented New York’s 12th congressional district for seven terms from 1969 to 1983. In 1972, she became the first black candidate for a major party’s nomination for President of the United States, and the first woman to run for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. In 2015, Chisholm was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Shirley Chisholm 39

“If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.”

Shirley Anita St. Hill was born on November 30, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York, to immigrant parents from the Caribbean region. She had three younger sisters, two born within three years after St. Hill, one later. Their father, Charles Christopher St. Hill, was born in British Guiana, lived in Barbados for a while, and then arrived in the United States via Antilla, Cuba, on April 10, 1923, aboard the S.S. Munamar in New York City. Their mother, Ruby Seale, was born in Christ Church, Barbados, and arrived in New York City aboard the S.S. Pocone on March 8, 1921. Her father was an unskilled laborer who sometimes worked in a factory that made burlap bags, but when he could not find factory employment instead worked as a baker’s helper, while her mother was a skilled seamstress and domestic worker who had trouble working and raising the children at the same time. As a consequence, in November 1929 as St. Hill turned five, she and her two sisters were sent to Barbados on the S.S. Vulcana to live with their maternal grandmother, Emaline Seale.There they lived on the grandmother’s farm in the Vauxhall village in Christ Church, where she attended a one-room schoolhouse that took education seriously. She did not return to the United States until May 19, 1934, aboard the SS Nerissa in New York.As a result, St. Hill spoke with a recognizable West Indian accent throughout her life.In her 1970 autobiography Unbought and Unbossed, she wrote: «Years later I would know what an important gift my parents had given me by seeing to it that I had my early education in the strict, traditional, British-style schools of Barbados. If I speak and write easily now, that early education is the main reason.» As a result of her time on the island, and regardless of her U.S. birth, St. Hill would always consider herself a Barbadian American. Regarding the role of her grandmother, she later said, «Granny gave me strength, dignity, and love. I learned from an early age that I was somebody. I didn’t need the black revolution to tell me that.» Beginning in 1939, St. Hill attended Girls’ High School in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, a highly regarded, integrated school that attracted girls from throughout Brooklyn. St. Hill earned her Bachelor of Arts

from Brooklyn College in 1946, where she won prizes for her debating skills. She was a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority. St. Hill met Conrad O. Chisholm in the late 1940s. He had migrated to the U.S. from Jamaica in 1946 and later became a private investigator who specialized in negligence-based lawsuits. They married in 1949 in a large West Indian-style wedding. Chisholm taught in a nursery school while furthering her education, earning her MA in elementary education from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1952. From 1953 to 1959, she was director of the Friends Day Nursery in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and of the HamiltonMadison Child Care Center in lower Manhattan. From 1959 to 1964, she was an educational consultant for the Division of Day Care. She became known as an authority on issues involving early education and child welfare. Running a day care center got her interested in politics, and during this time she formed the basis of her political career, working as a volunteer for white-dominated political clubs in Brooklyn, and with the Bedford-Stuyvesant Political League and the League of Women Voters. With the Political League she was part of a committee that chose the recipient of its annual Brotherhood Award. She also was a representative of the Brooklyn branch of the National Association of College Women. Chisholm was a Democratic member of the New York State Assembly from 1965 to 1968, sitting in the 175th, 176th and 177th New York State Legislatures. By May 1965 she had already been honored in a «Salute to Women Doers» affair in New York. One of her early activities in the Assembly was to argue against the state’s literacy test requiring English, holding that just because a person «functions better in his native language is no sign a person is illiterate». By early 1966 she was a leader in a push by the statewide Council of Elected Negro Democrats for black representation on key committees in the Assembly. Her successes in the legislature included getting unemployment benefits extended to domestic workers.

“You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas.”

Hoda Shaarawy 42

oda Shaarawy (June 23, 1879 – December 12, 1947) was a pioneering Egyptian feminist leader, nationalist, and founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union. Hoda was born in Upper Egypt to the famous Egyptian El-Shaarwi family. Hoda Shaarawy was born into a wealthy family in Minya, she was the daughter of Muhammad Sultan, the first president of the Egyptian Representative Council. She spent her childhood and early adulthood secluded in an upper-class Egyptian harem. At the age of thirteen, she was married to her cousin Ali Pasha Sha‘rawi.According to Margaret Badran, a «subsequent separation from her husband gave her time for an extended formal education, as well as an unexpected taste of independence.» She was taught to read the Quran and received tutoring in Quranic Arabic and Islamic subjects by female teachers in Cairo. Shaarawy wrote poetry in both Arabic and French. She later recounted her early life in her memoir, Mudhakkirātī («My Memoir») which was translated and

“I believe that history repeats itself, and for that reason, I am indebted to my namesake, Huda Al-Sharawy, an Egyptian feminist, and the first woman in the Middle East who called for female emancipation.”

abridged into the English version Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist, 1879-1924. At the time, women in Egypt were confined to the house or harem which she viewed as a very backward system brought by the Ottomans to MENA region. As seen in all of her pictures, Hoda is wearing a Hijab. Shaarawy resented such restrictions on women’s movements, and consequently started organizing lectures for women on topics of interest to them. This brought many women out of their homes and into public places for the first time. Shaarawy even convinced them to help her establish a women’s welfare society to raise money for the poor women of Egypt. In 1910, Shaarawy opened a school for girls where she focused on teaching academic subjects rather than practical skills such as midwifery. After World War I, many women took part in political actions against the British rule. In 1919, Shaarawy helped organize the largest women’s anti-British demonstration. In defiance of British authority orders to disperse, the women remained still for three hours in the hot sun. Shaarawy made a decision to stop wearing her veil in public after her husband’s death in 1922. Within a decade of Hoda’s act of defiance, few women still chose to wear the veil. Her decision to unveil was part of a greater movement of women, and was influenced by French born Egyptian feminist named Eugénie Le Brun, but it contrasted with some feminist thinkers like Malak Hifni Nasif. After returning from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance Congress in Rome, she removed her face veil in public for the first time, a signal event in the history of Egyptian feminism. Women who came to greet her were shocked at first then broke into applause and some of them removed their veils. In 1923, Shaarawy founded and became the first president of the Egyptian Feminist Union. Even as a young woman, she showed her independence by entering a department store in Alexandria to buy her own clothes instead of having them brought to her home. She helped to organize Mabarrat Muhammad ‘Ali, a women’s social service organization, in 1909 and the Union of Educated Egyptian Women in 1914, the year in which she traveled to Europe for the first time. She helped lead the first women’s

street demonstration during the Egyptian Revolution of 1919, and was elected president of the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee. She led Egyptian women pickets at the opening of Parliament in January 1924 and submitted a list of nationalist and feminist demands, which were ignored by the Wafdist government, whereupon she resigned from the Wafdist Women’s Central Committee. She continued to lead the Egyptian Feminist Union until her death, publishing the feminist magazine l’Egyptienne (and el-Masreyya), and representing Egypt at women’s congresses in Graz, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, Marseilles, Istanbul, Brussels, Budapest, Copenhagen, Interlaken, and Geneva. She advocated peace and disarmament. Even if only some of her demands were met during her lifetime, she laid the groundwork for later gains by Egyptian women and remains the symbolic standard-bearer for their liberation movement. She began to hold regular meetings for women at her home, and from this, the Egyptian Feminist Union was born. She launched a fortnightly journal, L’Égyptienne in 1925, in order to publicise the cause. Shaarawy received a major English-language biography by Sania Sharawi Lanfranchi. Hoda Shaarawy was involved in philanthropic projects throughout her life. In 1909, she created the first philanthropic society run by Egyptian women (Mabarrat Muhammad ‘Ali), offering social services for poor women and children. She argued that women-run social service projects were important for two reasons. First, by engaging in such projects, women would widen their horizons, acquire practical knowledge and direct their focus outward. Second, such projects would challenge the view that all women are creatures of pleasure and beings in need of protection. To Shaarawy, problems of the poor were to be resolved through charitable activities of the rich, particularly through donations to education programs. Holding a somewhat romanticized view of poor women’s lives, she viewed them as passive recipients of social services, not to be consulted about priorities or goals. The rich, in turn, were the «guardians and protectors of the nation.» 45

race Brewster Murray Hopper (nĂŠe Murray; December 9, 1906 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first compiler related tools. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. Hopper was born in New York City. She was the eldest of three children. Her parents, Walter Fletcher Murray and Mary Campbell Van Horne, were of Scottish and Dutch descent, and attended West End Collegiate Church. Her great-grandfather, Alexander Wilson Russell, an admiral in the US Navy, fought in the Battle of Mobile Bay during the Civil War. Grace was very curious as a child; this was a lifelong trait. At the age of seven, she decided to determine how

Grace Hopper 47

“A ship in port is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.”

an alarm clock worked and dismantled seven alarm clocks before her mother realized what she was doing (she was then limited to one clock). For her preparatory school education, she attended the Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey. Hopper was initially rejected for early admission to Vassar College at age 16 (her test scores in Latin were too low), but she was admitted the following year. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics and earned her master’s degree at Yale University in 1930. In 1934, she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale under the direction of Øystein Ore. Her dissertation, «New Types of Irreducibility Criteria», was published that same year. Hopper began teaching mathematics at Vassar in 1931, and was promoted to associate professor in 1941. She was married to New York University professor Vincent Foster Hopper (1906–1976) from 1930 until their divorce in 1945. She did not marry again, but chose to retain his surname. Hopper had tried to enlist in the Navy early in World War II. She was rejected for multiple reasons. At age 34, she was too old to enlist, and her weight to height ratio was too low. She was also denied on the basis that her job as a mathematician and mathematics professor at Vassar College was valuable to the war effort. During the war in 1943, Hopper obtained a leave of absence from Vassar and was sworn into the United States Navy Reserve; she was one of many women who volunteered to serve in the WAVES. She had to get an exemption to enlist; she was 15 pounds (6.8 kg) below the Navy minimum weight of 120 pounds (54 kg). She reported in December and trained at the Naval Reserve Midshipmen’s School at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. Hopper graduated first in her class in 1944, and was assigned to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University as a lieutenant, junior grade. She served on the Mark I computer programming staff headed by Howard H. Aiken. Hopper and Aiken co-authored three papers on the Mark I, also known as the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator. Hopper’s request to transfer to the regular Navy at the end of the war was declined due to her advanced age of 38.

She continued to serve in the Navy Reserve. Hopper remained at the Harvard Computation Lab until 1949, turning down a full professorship at Vassar in favor of working as a research fellow under a Navy contract at Harvard. In 1949, Hopper became an employee of the Eckert– Mauchly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician and joined the team developing the UNIVAC I. Hopper also served as UNIVAC director of Automatic Programming Development for Remington Rand. The UNIVAC was the first known large-scale electronic computer to be on the market in 1950, and was more competitive at processing information than the Mark I. When Hopper recommended the development of a new programming language that would use entirely English words, she «was told very quickly that [she] couldn’t do this because computers didn’t understand English.» Her idea was not accepted for 3 years, and she published her first paper on the subject, compilers, in 1952. In the early 1950s, the company was taken over by the Remington Rand corporation, and it was while she was working for them that her original compiler work was done. The program was known as the A compiler and its first version was A-0. In 1952 she had an operational link-loader, which at the time was referred to as a compiler. She later said that «Nobody believed that,» and that she «had a running compiler and nobody would touch it. They told me computers could only do arithmetic.» She goes on to say that her compiler «translated mathematical notation into machine code. Manipulating symbols was fine for mathematicians but it was no good for data processors who were not symbol manipulators. Very few people are really symbol manipulators. If they are they become professional mathematicians, not data processors. It’s much easier for most people to write an English statement than it is to use symbols. So I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code. That was the beginning of COBOL, a computer language for data processors.

“You don’t manage people; you manage things. You lead people.”

afterwords This lack of self-belief is something that I can all too well sympathise with. While outwardly chatty and confident with friends and family, in the workplace and at networking events, I often find myself questioning why anyone would want to talk with me and whether what I have to say is interesting enough. Take today, I stood right next to the broadcaster Jon Snow (C4â&#x20AC;&#x2122;s News Anchor) and failed miserably to rustle up a conversation to thank him for chairing a thought-provoking panel session I had just listened to. What I was concerned about, I am not too sure, but something stopped me, despite the fact that I had been happily tweeting comments throughout the conference. Like many young women, throughout school and university I had been taught to keep my head down, work hard and play by the rules, certain that if I adhered to this, somehow my talent and efforts would be rewarded. And while at school and university such an approach served me well, when I stepped into the outside world I soon learnt that success, no matter how hard you work comes with no guarantee. And just because you work 16 hours a day, diligently go beyond your daily tasks and excel in every one, this does not mean that youâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll be recognised for your achievements. In my 10 years, I have increasingly learnt that if you want to gain that all-important recognition and carve out a path to success, you have to get out there. Not only do you need to seize every opportunity and chance to

show what you’re capable of, but you also need to shout about it too. And for this to happen you need that all-important trait — confidence. Of course, I should caveat that there are many ways to define success and what that means is personal to each of us. For some women it is getting to the top of a corporate company, for others it might be to do something creative, starting their own business or raising a family. Whatever you define as success however, the fundamental issue of female self-doubt remains. Of course I am not talking about every woman in the UK, but the evidence is palpable. In 2011, the UK Institute of Leadership and Management surveyed British managers about how confident they feel in their professions. Half the female respondents reported self-doubt about their job performance and careers. Only a third of the men surveyed expressed such doubt. At Manchester Business School, Professor Marilyn Davidson reports that every year there are massive differences between what men and women expect to receive in terms of their post-graduating starting salary, with women usually quoting 20% less than their male counterparts. Coming to the fore is also neurological evidence to suggest that women process emotional energy differently to men, which means when they receive negative feedback, it weighs far more heavily on them — and the impact can be more profound. How much we can overcome this — scientists are yet to discover but looking at the differences between male and female brains is still perceived as a taboo — with women fearing that the results of tests could impact on them negatively. When you speak to women about how they think they might have done on a particular test or essay, they all-too-often take the glass half empty approach, whereas the men tend to be far more bullish in their predictions. And then, if a female ends up scoring highly, all-too-often the answer is ‘oh I just got lucky…’ rather than ‘I deserved that.’ Yet in the workplace, if a woman is perceived to be speaking too much in meetings, or talks openly

about their ambition to climb the ladder or is seeking out opportunities to self-promote, they can be labelled somewhat unfortunately a ‘b*tch’ or on a ‘power trip’ — a charge that is rarely levelled against men who exhibit the same traits. Some employers are beginning to take a proactive approach in addressing concerns on confidence — making it a formal part of the official review process for employees, so that both men and women receive the advice they need to improve their confidence — indicating the weight given to this trait in working life. The treatment of women in the workplace is perhaps indicative of the way in which women across society are seemingly judged differently to men — be it for their actions, their appearance or even their opinions… I don’t have the answers as to why women seem to be judged with a far more critical eye, nor do I have the answers as to what can be done to change this, but what I do know is that when it comes to your career, the best thing you can do to overcome a lack of confidence is to practice. By acting more confidently and putting yourself into new situations where you’ll need to test this, you can start training your brain to become more confident. Treat it like a skill you wish to acquire. If you want to learn a new sport or take up a new hobby, you should not expect to be brilliant straight away. To get good at something you need to practice. To get good at something, you have to act. And so, if you take one thing from this article let it be this, practice being more confident. The more you do it, the easier it will become. There are no shortcuts but ironically by working hard and focusing — you’ll be on a crucial path to closing your own confidence gap.

Літературно-художнє видання

Ольга Корнієнко 10 жінок, які змінили світ, але все ще недостатньо відомі

Англійською мовою

Керівники проекту А. А. Зелінська, В. Е. Шевченко Редактор О. М. Корнієнко Художній редактор О. М. Корнієнко Технічний редактор О. М. Корнієнко

Підписано до друку 05.12.2018 Формат 75х90/16. Друк цифровий Гарнітура Georgia. Ум. друк. арк. 3,47. Наклад 100 примірників. Замовлення № 22/06.

Видавництво «Альвеола» Свідоцтво № ОК22 від 22.06.1998 Київ, вул. Єреванська, 149 E-mail: alveola-not-existing-mail@gmail.com

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