Search

This article focuses on the life and work of Victorian naval engineer Henrietta Vansittart (1833–1883), who designed and patented the Lowe-Vansittart propeller, a model of which is held in the Science Museum collections. Vansittart is a rare example of a woman who practised as an engineer in nineteenth century Britain, yet hitherto she has not been the subject of extensive academic research. This article contributes to wider efforts to recover the multifaceted roles that women have historically played in engineering, which have often been obscured or overlooked. Using a range of primary sources, including a pamphlet written by Vansittart that is held in the Science Museum Library, alongside newspaper articles, contemporary engineering literature and personal letters, this article seeks to uncover what we can learn from her life and work. It will explore available routes into engineering for women in this period, when formal education and training opportunities were not open to them, and discuss how a woman in engineering could frame herself in this context. For Vansittart, her father’s engineering work was the vital access point to engineering. She did not receive a formal education, so it was through him that she informally learnt about the technicalities of screw propellers. This article will demonstrate the importance of family connections for women generally to enter into the field of engineering and reveal the ways in which Vansittart in particular used familial legacy to construct her position as an engineer, helping her to eschew prevalent gender norms. The article will also question why we do not know more about Vansittart’s career, by exploring the complexities of her personal life and how this may have impacted on her legacy.

According to UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS) data (UIS fact sheet, 2019), less than 30% of researchers worldwide are women. Long-standing biases and gender stereotypes are discouraging girls and women away from science related fields. In particular, STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) research is traditionally male dominated and women remain underrepresented. As UNESCO has highlighted, both science and gender equality are, however, essential to ensuring sustainable development. In order to change traditional mindsets, gender equality must be promoted, stereotypes defeated, and girls and women should be encouraged to pursue careers in STEM. Throughout history, the contributions of female researchers to scientific progress have been extremely important. Yet, whereas the extraordinarily talented Nobel laureate Marie Sklodowska-Curie is often mentioned as a role model, it is nowadays well established that countless women such as Lise Meitner have received less recognition and acknowledgement for their research findings than their male counterparts (so-called Matilda effect (Rossiter, 1993)). Also, women traditionally publish less than men according to the European Commission She Figures, the ratio of women to men among authors of scientific publications in the EU being on the average one to two (EU, 2018), and recent surveys are highlighting a further drop in academic submissions from female scientists since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic early 2020. Role models are definitely extremely important to show to younger generations the growing impact of female researchers to science. Therefore, continuing the spirit of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, Frontiers in Materials is proud to offer this platform to promote the work of female scientists, across the breadth of materials science and engineering. This inaugural ‘Women in Science: Materials’ collection (Fig.1) aims to highlight the impact of women researchers working in materials science and engineering. It gathers a selection of original articles with the lead author and/or corresponding author being a woman. 32 contributions (3 reviews, 1 brief research report and 28 original research articles) present advances in theory, experiment and methodology with applications to compelling problems, across almost all sections of the journal:  Mechanics of materials (Bouquerel et al., Jeong et al., TerMaath et al., Zhu et al.);  Smart materials (Duc et al.);  Polymeric and composite materials (Badji et al., Berzin et al., Brunella et al., Hostettler et al., Martins and Gil, Mirbaha et al., Padhan et al., Quintana et al., Raj et al., Saffar et al.);  Carbon-based materials (Kato et al., Moulefera et al., Xu et al., Zhang et al.);  Structural materials (Bonoli et al., Boyer et al., Korat and Ducman, Manzi et al., Masi et al.);  Colloidal materials and interfaces (Garcia-Hernando et al., Pucci et al.);  Energy materials (Castro-Gutierrez et al.);  Ceramics and glass (Giosue et al.);  Environmental materials (Bassi et al.);  Biomaterials (Criado-Gonzalez et al., Kebaili et al.); The Guest Editorial team hope that this collection of papers will be the foundation of an international network of women researchers working in materials science and engineering, and a starting point for future collaborations and discussions.

NSERC

"Joining WiSE Conversations: Strategies and Successes from CWSE-ON" is a record of initiatives undertaken by Professor Valerie Davidson and her team as part of the Chair for Women in Science and Engineering - Ontario (CWSE-ON) program. The electronic version includes hyperlinks to collaborators and resources. NSERC, Hewlett-Packard Canada (2003-2008), Research in Motion (2008-2011), University of Guelph

This document provides a comprehensive summary of an invited plenary presentation made by Dr. Valerie Davidson, NSERC/HP Chair for Women in Science and Engineering for Ontario, to the Royal Society of Canada Conference (RCSC) in Edmonton, Alberta on May 3, 2007. The conference was designed to offer an international forum for discussion of the factors within local and global cultures that can facilitate and constrain women's active participation in the knowledge economy and society. The theme of the 2007 conference was ‘Rooms of their Own – Women in the Knowledge Economy and Society.’ This theme was borrowed from Virginia Woolf’s cogent essay “A Room of One’s Own” on the unfortunate societal constrictions suffered by professional women in her time. In this 1929 essay, Wolfe predicted that women “in another century or so,” if given the opportunity and rooms of their own, would “have the habit of freedom and the courage to write exactly what we think,” seeing human beings “in their relation to each other” and “in relation to reality. Drawing on these ideas, it was the goal of the RCSC conference to engage in an in-depth consideration of the situation of women in the academy. It was hoped that this would serve to increase awareness about the challenges facing women in academia, expand the knowledge base on such issues and result in the formation of practical recommendations to address them. Dr. Davidson’s presentation spoke to these themes.

At the 12th National CCWESTT Conference: Building on Success, there was a workshop to solicit ideas from conference participants on strategic directions for promoting the participation of women in SETT. The focus of the workshop was to discuss how the NSERC Chair for Women in Science and Engineering (CWSE) program can best support the work of relevant stakeholders and to identify what support and resources may be available from stakeholders to enable the CWSE program to function better. The session was held on the final day of the conference (31st of May 2008) and was attended by approximately 50 women who had participated in the conference. These women represented various interest groups (stakeholders) including: undergraduate and graduate students in science and engineering, social science researchers/academics, professional engineers and scientists, and those working in advocacy programs. The 5 current NSERC chairs representing (1) the Atlantic provinces, (2) British Columbia & Yukon, (3) Ontario, (4) the Prairie provinces, and (5) Quebec, were also in attendance. The workshop participants were asked to grapple with two questions: 1) How can the NSERC Chairs Programs make a meaningful contribution to the success of your work? 2) How can your work make a meaningful contribution to the NSERC Chairs Program? Participants were encouraged to contemplate the questions with their specific interest group (e.g., student, researcher) in mind. The participants were assigned to 4 different groups. Three groups were asked to focus on question one and the fourth group was asked to focus on second question. Under the guidance of a facilitator, the groups held discussions and generated responses to the questions. Individual participants also responded to the questions on paper. This report summarizes the ideas generated from both groups and individuals during the session.

The purpose of this study was to examine how institutional culture promoted or impeded the implementation of round one and two NSF ADVANCE initiatives designed to improve academic climates for women in science and engineering. This study was conducted in two phases. In phase one, 35 participants from 18 institutions were interviewed to answer three research questions. Participants identified a policy, process, or program designed to improve academic cultures for women in science and engineering fields. Participants also identified strategies that promoted the implementation of these efforts, and discussed factors that impeded these efforts. In phase two, site visits were conducted at two institutions to answer a fourth research question. How did institutional culture shape the design and implementation of faculty search processes? Policies, processes, and programs were implemented by participants at the institutional, departmental, and individual levels and included family friendly and dual career policies at the institutional level, improved departmental faculty search and climate improvement processes, and mentoring programs and training for department heads at the individual level. Communication and leadership strategies were key to the successful implementation of policies, processes, and programs designed to achieve institutional transformation. Communication strategies involved shaping change messages to reach varied audiences often with the argument that change efforts would improve the climate for everyone not just women faculty members. Administrative and faculty leaders from multiple levels proved important to change efforts. Institutional culture shaped initiatives to improve faculty search processes. Faculty leaders in both settings used data to persuade faculty members of the need for change. At one site, data that included national availability information was critical to advancing the change agenda. At the other site, social science data that illustrated gender bias was persuasive. Faculty members who were effective as change agents were those who were credible with their peers in that setting. Ph. D.