[My daughter] needs to pick a famous person to study for a biography report. Her teacher suggests she pick a female scientist, but requires that each student find a book about their person. The intersection set of female scientists, published biographies in book form, and our library's collection is pretty close to zero. She's not interested in Marie Curie *again*.
One person (a female scientist herself) questioned why my daughter should be limited to female scientists.
I feel like telling a girl to write a report about a female scientist is, in some ways, propagating the problem.
I would dispense with the gender criteria, at least until we write some more and better bios.
I would also defend the teacher’s suggestion to my daughter that she choose a female scientist for this project. Research shows that female role models in science significantly impact on girls both in their attitudes towards science in adolescence and their likelihood to pursue scientific careers. In my own department, we’ve noted a sharp drop in the proportion of our majors that are women. The drop started at the same time we reorganized our introductory teaching faculty, leaving no women teaching the introductory course. This year, I taught the course, and so far, it looks like it had the desired effect, reversing the trend.
I will keep exposing my kids to as many examples of female scientists as they mature, along with the many examples of men and women following non-traditional roles. I want my kids to see their futures as wide open, without limited themselves. I do wish, however, that we can find ourselves in a future where biographies don’t follow the sadly common theme of “here’s the woman that should have gotten the Nobel Prize along with her male collaborators.”