Every February 11, since it was proclaimed in 2015 by the United Nations General Assembly, the World Day of Women and Girls in Science is celebrated around the world, with the aim of achieving equitable participation for women as a goal. girls and women in scientific fields, as well as fighting for the strengthening of the situation in society of girls and women around the world.
Today we review those essential women, without whom our world, as we know it, would not have been the same.
We are sure you know the names of the most famous male inventors whose inventions also transformed our reality: Galileo Galilei, Leonardo da Vinci, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Alva Edison, Nikola Tesla, Louis Pasteur, Tim Berners-Lee, Steve Jobs … ). But do you know the many women whose groundbreaking and groundbreaking ideas in science and technology also improved the world you live in?
Women inventors are not recognized as often as men. Many suffered what is known as the “Matilda Effect”, a very common practice in the past in which thousands of scientists saw how their research, work, studies, discoveries, were attributed to men despite being the true discoverers or inventors .
There is still a long way to go and hopefully the case of so many forgotten scientists, such as Nettie Stevens , later known as the discoverer of the XY system of sex determination (whose discoveries were attributed to geneticist Thomas Hunt Morgan), Marthe Gautier , who discovered the chromosomal abnormality that causes Down syndrome (and whose milestone was attributed to the pediatrician and father of modern genetics Jerome Lejeune) or, perhaps the best known case, that of the British chemist Rosalind Franklin, who discovered, among others things, the structure of DNA (and whose recognition in the form of a Nobel Prize did not receive her but her colleagues Francis Crick and James Watson), is a thing of the past in our future.
The history of science has many male names, but also female ones. Today we are talking about a large number of inventions made by women, yesterday and today.
