Book Launch: The Bold and the Brave

Date: 1st December 2009
Time: 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm

Location:
University of Ottawa
Colonel By Hall,
Tower A, Room 707
161 Louis-Pasteur

The Bold and the Brave investigates how women have strived throughout history to gain access to education and careers in science and engineering. Author Monique Frize, herself an engineer for over 40 years, introduces the reader to key concepts and debates that contextualize the obstacles women have faced and continue to face in the fields of science and engineering. She focuses on the history of women’s education in mathematics and science through the ages, from antiquity to the Enlightenment. While opportunities for women were often purposely limited, she reveals how many women found ways to explore science outside of formal education. The book examines the lives and work of three women – Sophie Germain, Mileva Einstein, and Rosalind Franklin - that provide excellent examples of how women's contributions to science have been dismissed, ignored or stolen outright. She concludes with an in-depth and often personal look at women’s participation in science and engineering throughout the twentieth century and the current status of women in science and engineering, which has experienced a decline in recent years. To encourage more young women to pursue careers in science and engineering she advocates re-gendering the fields by integrating feminine and masculine approaches that would ultimately improve scientific and engineering endeavours.

The Bold and the Brave, by Dr. Monique Frize, INWES Immediate Past President and Professor at the Department of Computer and Systems Engineering, Carleton University and at the School of Information Technology and Engineering, University of Ottawa. Published by the University of Ottawa Press.

For more information

Women in science, engineering, and technology: three decades of UK initiatives

This book presents an accessible overview of the recent history of UK initiatives designed to encourage girls and women into the fields of science, engineering, construction, and technology (SECT). It examines around 150 groups and projects such as classroom-based action research interventions, after-school and residential courses for pupils, support and networking groups for women SECT students and professionals, and training programmes for socially excluded women. Using archival and interview data spanning the period from the 1970s to the early 2000s, it explores the aims and frameworks of the initiatives, examines the practices developed, and comments on the mixed results which have been achieved.

There is a substantial body of policy and academic research concerning the causes of women's under-representation in non-traditional fields, but the arena of initiatives designed to address the problem is under-researched in itself. This means that there has been little opportunity for educational practitioners, activists, policy-makers, and scholars to analyse and learn from the practices which have been developed. This book provides a key reference point for such reflection.

Women in science, engineering, and technology: three decades of UK initiatives, by Alison Phipps, Director of Gender Studies, University of Sussex. Published by Trentham Books.