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GregToday is Ada Lovelace Day, a (now) annual event when bloggers celebrate the the work of women in the fields of science and technology. When I decided to take part I thought long and hard about who I should write about – we’re now fortunate to have a growing number of notable female scientists and technology experts so it was difficult to single any one out. However, I decided I’d leave the famous women for somebody else, and devote my post to a woman few (if any) of you will have heard of, but whose knowledge of, and enthusiasm for all things scientific and technological had a significant influence on me, and I would hope many other girls.
When I was eight, I had the extreme good fortune to be placed in the class of Miss Vaughan, a woman I can only describe as decades ahead of her time. Miss Vaughan would have been unusual in any school in the 1970s, but even more so in a cosy Catholic primary school.
At a time when certain elements of the curriculum were still divided into subjects for boys – science, technology – and subjects for girls – home economics, needlework – this small, religious school in a market town had on it’s staff a woman who had completely broken down those stereotypes and become a qualified and talented science teacher. Even more remarkable, Miss Vaughan did not come from the privileged, British, upper/middle class background of women like Ada Lovelace; she came to this country from Trinidad – an immigrant – and initially trained as a nurse before moving into teaching. With hindsight, I suspect this may be the reason she was working in a backwater, rather than at a more prestigious institution.
Whatever the reason, we were lucky to have her, not just because of what she had done, but because she was one of those teachers whose positive influence on their pupils lasts long after they’ve moved on to another class.
Miss Vaughan’s enthusiasm for her subject was infectious; whether we were having a lesson about the lives of the tiny mayflies which skated around the surface of the class pond, or discussing the ethics of vivisection. She had the ability to break hugely complex subjects down into child-sized bites of information, thus making the inaccessible, accessible. But more relevant to this post: she never made any distinction between the female pupils and the male; she just assumed we all had the ability to learn and understand whatever she was teaching us. And she never dismissed a question, no matter how odd, or how silly it might sound, she would answer, and then encourage us to discuss the subject as a class.
The class discussions were probably a first taste of informed debate for most of us – we were only eight. Unusually, these were allowed to follow a natural course, we were never forced to stick to a narrow topic; if a subject veered off at a tangent we were encouraged to go wherever it led us. She insisted we ask questions, but more importantly, expected us to go further than the answers she gave us, and read and research to gain an even greater understanding.
Those were her qualities as a teacher generally, but as the teacher of girls she brought something extra that was quite unusual at the time. The words “you can’t do that because you are a girl”, would never have left her lips, I can’t imagine they would even have entered her head. To her a mind was a mind, and her actions and conduct left us in no doubt that, as far as she was concerned, there was nothing we couldn’t do if we set our minds to it. If we had any doubts about that, we only had to look at her, a woman who lived and breathed the supposedly male subject of science.
Fast forward to the 21st century, and the numbers of women working in science and technology have grown, but we are still outnumbered by men, and girls are still the minority in sci/tech courses at school and college. There are a number of reasons for this, but the lack of direct female role models is a big factor. Girls may hear about high profile women in these fields, but too few encounter real role models in the course of their education.
Speaking personally, having such a role model played a part in the self-belief that enabled me to go into a male dominated field – and in internet technology circles, men are still very much the majority! It’s true that things are moving in the right direction, the number of female science graduates is growing, more and more women are forging careers in technology, but it’s still not the 50/50 split it should be. I’m pretty sure the numbers would be far more even if every little girl encountered a Miss Vaughan, someone who has no time for the concept of male subjects and female subjects; someone who understands a child’s intelligence, talents and abilities are unique to them, and are not simply a product of their gender.
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