What is the INWES Herstories project? It collects stories from INWES members who are willing to share their career experiences with others. We hope everyone in INWES will soon be able to use those life stories to inspire more young women to choose careers in science and engineering. Twelve INWES members have so far kindly contributed to Herstories in online interviews with students at the University of Leeds (UK), supervised by historian of technology, Professor Graeme Gooday. He and Dr Emily Rees Koerner have assembled the Herstories Oral History toolkit so that anyone can collect life stories of INWES members.
Where can these stories be found? Roseni Dearden is working with colleagues to build a dedicated INWES portal where those stories will soon be available for sharing. In this INWES Newsletter, to mark International Women’s Day, you can glimpse the twelve stories so far collected in abstracts prepared by University of Leeds postgraduate student, Nida Qureshi.
While the current toolkit is in English, Herstories aims to make it available in other languages too. Herstories understands that INWES members will typically prefer to use their mother tongue to record their lives. So Nida Qureshi, for example, is working to prepare an Urdu translation of the toolkit to help Urdu speakers share their stories.
At ICWES 20 this August, Professor Gooday’s plenary lecture will explain how everyone can be part of the Herstories project. INWES needs your stories, especially of the teams that you have worked with. Please share them!
Happy International Women’s Day!
8th March, 2026
With many thanks to Nida and Professor Graeme,
This project is a follow-on from Electrifying Women International, and is led by Prof Graeme Gooday of the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science, University of Leeds UK. INWES is collaborating with Prof Gooday and his team including Dr Emily Rees Koerner to help develop a toolkit for gathering oral histories of the many hidden women in STEM around the world.
During late 2022 and early 2023, Prof Gooday, Emily Rees Koerner and students from University of Leeds developed a toolkit and piloted on several interviews of INWES members and other women in STEM. This page will hold the toolkit and first initial stories as created.
The goals of this programme are
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- to create and disseminate an oral history toolkit to be used by anyone to record, ethically and accurately, hidden voices and stories;
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- to develop a safe and reliable repository of the stories gathered by INWES members of invisible women in STEM around the world;
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- and ultimately to make our hidden history more visible.
For more on the work already carried out, see this INWES blog post. INWES has held webinars on this work such as this INWES event.
The Toolkit
The toolkit provided here can be used by any group, in STEM or not.
INWES Toolkit for Recording Histories of Women in STEM
Do let INWES know if you are using this toolkit and we would love to include the stories you collect of women in STEM in our repository! For more information: communications@inwes.net
Our Stories
The stories are listed below. Please stay tuned as we continue to add more inspiring journeys to this collection.
Note on privacy and confidentiality: Please note the individuals featured here can at any time request that their story be corrected, amended or removed from this webpage and indeed from the record. To request a correction, amended or removal please contact communications@inwes.net with the subject including
“IMPORTANT: Data Request”, and copied to info@inwes.net.