It can be difficult for a society to shrug off a bad idea it’s been running with for millennia. Unequal treatment of the genders is on its way out, but many of our contemporary innovations still carry the smear of institutionalized discrimination or de facto bias.
Take Wikipedia, for example. Despite the fact that our communal encyclopedia provides a wealth of accessible information, women make up fewer than 15% of the project’s editors. (For further information, see the Wikipedia article “Wikipedia: Systemic bias.”) Oftentimes, the lack of gender parity results in a dearth of articles about, or including, important female figures in society. That’s what science journalist and BrainPOP news director Maia Weinstock found when she started editing Wikipedia articles back in 2007: Women who should be included in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) achievement canon were simply missing from the archives. Or, when they were included, their stories were often stubs that left out the magnitude of their contributions.
In attempt to rectify some of these wrongs, Weinstock organized a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon held on last year’s Ada Lovelace day, a holiday dedicated to celebrating achievements of women in STEM fields, named for the pioneering 19th-century scientist (who, thankfully, has an extensive Wikipedia entry). Today, Weinstock is organizing another round of editing at Brown University, in which some 40 contributors will help write articles from scratch or expand stubs on women pioneers.
“We hope that this will be replicated in the future, and we’d like these things to be done every day, not just Ada Lovelace day,” Weinstock said.
Edit-a-thon has posted a list of the articles its editors seek to create and to expand during the event, and below are some highlights. They include female innovators who currently don’t exist on Wikipedia, or do exist on Wikipedia but in a very limited capacity.
Liane Brauch Russell, Geneticist
Liane Brauch Russell was born to a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1923, and fled to London during World War II. She moved to the United States to pursue her studies, and after graduating from Hunter College and initiating her PhD at the University of Chicago, Russell went to work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which had been used to develop nuclear weapons as part of the Manhattan Project. There, Russell launched a major investigation into the effects of radiation on mice, and shed significant light on the relationship between prenatal exposure to radiation and birth defects.
Russell was the first scientist to figure out the periods of embryonic development that were critical to healthy growth of different parts of the body, according to the Department of Energy, and later won the DOE’s Enrico Fermi award for her work convincing doctors that prenatal exposure to radiation needed to be prevented. In the early ’90s, Russell also helped secure a 125,000-acre piece of land in Tennessee now dedicated to preserving the Big South Fork National River and its tributaries. She does not have a Wikipedia page.