It's Always More Complicated

I'm not sure that these two links to book reviews that I recently found of interest are quite what this day is about, as they are about a rather wider engagement between women and science than merely 'careers in STEM', but actually, that might have been what Ada - and her mother - and her maths tutor Mary Somerville - and so many other women who engaged with SCIENCE - were all about?

In a New Light: Histories of Women and Energy, a collection of essays focused on how women shaped the fossil fuel energy transition from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century in Canada, England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany:

[A]n important contribution to the growing literature on energy transitions around the world. Of course, women were part of the story, but they have not been as much a part of the documented history.
....
The essays illustrate the anxiety and ambiguity felt by many when asked to change their habits, their duties, and their societal roles in order to use newfangled energy technologies. This, the authors suggest, should serve as a caution for twenty-first-century citizens. The stories of how women navigated the new world of industrialized and networked energy systems indicate agency and responsibility across societies—just because the domestic domain was designated female did not exempt it from a role in the fossil fuel transition.

Anne Skomorowsky’s The Carriers: What the Fragile X Gene Reveals about Family, Heredity, and Scientific Discovery illuminates the often-overlooked stories of women who carry the fragile X premutation gene:

Skomorowsky shows how fragile X spectrum conditions came to be understood and diagnosed as a result of communities of women willing to empathize and take one another seriously—essential emotional labor that has led to critical medical breakthroughs. Several chapters are dedicated to carriers’ challenges with FXPOI, toxic gain of RNA function, and resulting physical and mental health challenges, including brain and ovary damage. Distinct accounts show women being misunderstood or dismissed by medical providers who resort to overmedicating against symptoms without identifying root causes. On the socio-emotional side, we see the overwhelming demands on mothers who are premutation carriers and face complex intellectual and behavioral symptoms, while also parenting their children with fragile X or the premutation. Imperative, however, are women’s accounts of self-recognition and identity-building as they learn about their premutation, make sense of their personal history, and free themselves from burdensome self-criticism in their adult lives.