Why it’s so important for girls to find role models in female scientists

Women’s contribution to history often gets overlooked in textbooks. Unless you took some women’s studies classes in college, you might think the whole world was built by men. That’s obviously not true. There have been many talented female scientists, engineers, and innovators who changed the world for the better. But because men dominated for an awfully long time, they got to shape and write history. That’s gradually beginning to change.

If you want to read about some pretty awesome women who changed history, you should read Wonder Women by Sam Maggs. I wish I had this book growing up in Italy, where women voted for the first time in 1946 (that’s not even 100 years ago!) and being catcalled on the street is as common as spotting a historical monument (very common!). It would have just made imagining any future — whatever I wanted to be growing up — much easier.

Wonder Women is a collection of stories of 25 women doctors, mathematicians, spies and forgers, writers, soldiers, inventors, and other pioneers in STEM, not just in the United States but all over the world. Maggs, a video game writer and author, made a particular effort to include women from all backgrounds and races, to get the point across that all women deserve recognition for their work.

Not only were these women just as capable as — if not more capable than — their fellow men, they also had to overcome incredible obstacles, like parents who didn’t want them to go to school, laws that kept them from performing their job, and male colleagues who stole their inventions and the credit. It’s a great little book to keep on your desk to remind yourself that even though you’re probably paid less than a man for the same amount of work, and men interrupt you while you’re talking, you can do whatever you set your mind to!

In celebration of International Women’s Day, The Verge spoke with Maggs about how Wonder Women came to be, why it’s important to have female role models in STEM, and whether the tide is finally changing.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

How did you come up with the idea for Wonder Women?

I’ve always really been interested in women’s historical stories. I did my master’s degree in a particular subset of Victorian literature called Sensation Fiction, which was basically about women behaving badly. When I wrote my first book, The Fangirl’s Guide to the Galaxy, it was all about women being marginalized in the geek culture and pop culture fields and how to sort of embrace that. From there, it seemed sort of a natural progression to move into the STEM field.

I work in video game development full time now, and tech and a lot of the science industry still has a pretty big gender gap in terms of people who work there. I think part of the reason that that’s true is because of a real lack of role models for women in these fields. I thought it’d be really interesting to combine that need for role models with my interest in women and history, and hopefully bring some of these women to the forefront, and hopefully inspire some girls and women to get into the fields that they’re passionate about.

How did you choose the women featured in the book?

It was really difficult, to be honest with you. We only ever hear about basically the same two women: Marie Curie and Ada Lovelace. It’s like, “you have those, so you’re fine.” But once you start researching it, there are actually so many women whose accomplishments have been lost to time, or the credit was taken by their male colleagues, or in some cases they intentionally gave away the credit. Great examples of this are black women at the turn of the 20th century who were inventors, often didn’t want their names attributed to their work because they were afraid that if white people found out that a black person invented it, they wouldn’t buy the invention. So, there’s a lot of stories lost to time for a variety of different reasons, and we’re just starting to realize how many of them there really are.

In terms of narrowing it down to just the 25 larger ones in the book, for me the priority was diversity. Because a lot of the time, when we start covering these stories, we tend to focus only on white Western women, which there are many of [them] in the book also. But I thought it was really important to make sure that women who are particularly marginalized and underrepresented in these fields — women of color and queer women particularly — could also see themselves represented on the page. I really wanted to make sure to include women from India and Japan and China and all over, so that we really got all different kinds of perspectives and stories from around the world.

The book is filled with quirky facts about these women. What was your research process, and how hard was it to find information about them?

It was actually really difficult. Basically, one of the very first things that I learned was that Wikipedia is full of lies. It’s a very interesting place to start if you’re casually looking for information on people, but once you start to dig into the source material, you find that a lot of the “facts” on Wikipedia are really unreliable. So I actually spent a lot of time hunting down primary sources. I was very lucky to have help from librarians and various historians all over the world, who sent me original writing by these women, original newspaper articles, original papers, in some cases original paintings, scans of things — just to make sure that I had all the accurate information.

One website that I used that I really liked is called Chronicling America. Basically, it’s an online archive that’s digitized all the newspapers across America going back to the 1800s. So if you want to know what was going on in your community on a Wednesday in 1860, you can go onto this website and read the paper from that day. It’s really fascinating because you can find all these hidden stories and unknown facts and frankly hilarious advertisements from that time. That’s a really super interesting resource that I encourage people to check out.

What do these women have in common?

I think there are two major trends: one of the unfortunate trends throughout the book was often times women didn’t receive credit for the work that they did because it was taken or attributed to their male colleagues, or because they either took the credit intentionally or the public wasn’t willing to believe that women were capable of that kind of thought or invention or knowledge. They were much more likely to go, “Oh, their boss must have done it! She can’t do that!” That was one of the most unfortunate and sort of frustrating themes that I found throughout the book, which is why I tried to keep the book sort of light and humorous in as many cases as I could. It definitely was one of those if-you-don’t-laugh-you’ll-cry situations.

The other theme that I found throughout the book that actually was really inspiring is women helping women. All throughout history, overwhelmingly, the way that women have succeeded in any of these fields, was to be supported by female friends and family members and their community. I think one of my favorite examples of this is Amandibai Joshi, who was the Indian girl in the 1880s that ended up coming to America and becoming the first Indian person in America at all, and the first Indian woman, to get a degree in Western medicine. And she was able to do so because she became pen pals with a young widow in New Jersey, named Theodicia Carpenter, who brought her over and they lived together. And the two of them were assisted by the Dean of the Women’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. So it was this big confluence of women helping women to have this great historical thing happen. [It] ended up actually benefiting India when she went back and was in charge of a hospital and opened a practice where she could train other women to become GPs. That was really inspiring to me.

The book has a comic book vibe to it. Who’s your target audience?

I originally wanted to write a book for women around my own age, mid 20s. But as I started writing it, I realized that this was a topic that could broadly benefit everyone, so I wanted to make it as accessible as possible, whether you’re 11 years old or 30 years old, a dude or a lady — whoever wants to get into this. That’s why I tried to make it look very approachable. I was very lucky to have it illustrated by Sophia Foster-Dimino, who’s a Google doodler who has great little spot illustrations all over the book.

It’s also why I used a sort of humorous, lighter tone. A lot of the time when people think about biographies or think about textbooks, they think dry and dusty and boring. They are serious subjects and important topics, but it doesn’t mean you have to talk about them in a way that isn’t interesting. [I wanted to make] clear that, even though they did all these important things that are downright heroic when you look back at them, they were just people like us. A lot of the girls in this book were like 23 or 21 years old when they accomplished their big deeds. It was important to me to make them as relatable as possible.

At the end of each section, you include a Q&A with a living wonder woman. Why is that?

I really wanted to show girls and women reading the book that not only have women succeeded in these fields historically, but that there are still women in these fields who continue to be pioneering, successful women across the board in STEM — all kinds of women. And I really wanted to show that you also don’t have to feel relegated to be a doctor or a scientistic if this is the kind of thing you’re interested in. I wanted to highlight women in a variety of fields across STEM to show what kind of variety there really is in these jobs.

It was really cool talking to Lynn Conway who’s a trans woman, who’s also been an activist for trans women in STEM, as well as her career in microchip development. It was really cool talking to Mika McKinnon, who’s a science consultant on television shows; or Dr. Buddhini Samarasinghe, who’s a science communicator and makes science more fun to regular people who don’t understand science super well like me. I really wanted to highlight those women who are still paving the way and hopefully will show people that it’s totally doable. There are women doing these things right now, and you can be like them.

Have you experienced discrimination or sexism yourself in your life?

Sure. I’m lucky to work at a game company that prioritizes diversity and inclusion very strongly, but I think we see generally as a trend in gaming, in technology fields, something like only 13 percent of all game designers are women. When you look at the statistics of who works at Google and who works at Facebook, it is a startlingly low number of women and an even lower number of women of color. I think that across the board we’re starting to make a lot of progress in the right direction and the more we have conversations like this, the more that progress continues to be made. But it’s definitely an industry-wide issue in tech at the moment.

There’s still a lot of systemic problems that we face in STEM fields, with getting girls into the fields, which just starts with a gender bias at a young age. When you look at gender toy isles, most of the boys’ toys are geared toward building and Lego and connects and that sort of stuff, and you don’t see that as much with girls’ toys. From a very young age, we already start to program these sorts of gender expectations into girls as to what they should get into, which is then where you see a real big disparity in how many girls are in computer science programs in college, which then translates to how many girls get into tech and game design and science after college. We really need to continue thinking about how we gender careers and education paths, and make all careers more accessible to all genders.

Do you have a favorite wonder woman?

I talked about Amandibai Joshi earlier. She’s definitely one of my favorites and I think another one of my favorites is Bessie Coleman, who was born to black and Native American parents in the American South in the 1890s, so a tough start to begin with. But she really wanted to prove that women of color could be incredibly successful, and when she was rejected from flight school in America because of her race and her gender, she taught herself French, moved to France, and got her pilot’s license two full years before Amelia Earhart. And when she returned to America she got super famous doing a lot of stunt shows all across the country, but she would only perform for crowds that weren’t segregated. So in addition to being incredibly successful in her field of aviation, she was also a real pioneer in terms of civil rights activism. So, she was pretty cool.

Is the tide changing, you think? Are we finally recognizing women’s role in history?

I think that there’s a real movement right now, that I think Wonder Women is a part of, that is sort of reclaiming this part of women’s history and advocating for women to get the credit they deserved all along. There’s a ton of books about women in history right now, and not just about science history, [but also] sport history, just across the board in terms of recognizing women’s accomplishments. And I really hope that Wonder Women is part of what put these women’s names back on the map, back into the discourse, and back into textbooks where they belong.

What do you want your readers to take away from this book?

I want women and girls who read the book to know that they can do whatever they want to do, whatever they’re passionate about. They should follow their dreams, regardless of what people tell them they can’t do or what they shouldn’t do. You shouldn’t listen to that, and you should blaze your own trail and it may be difficult and awful and harder than it’s ever been throughout history, but just know that there are women supporting you and that you should do what you love and what makes you happiest in this world.