Take Offence Tuesday: Women Can't Write?

Take Offence Tuesday is about appreciating the heights we have reached in just a few decades. It is easy to sometimes forget where we started but it is important to remind ourselves. TOT (Take Offence Tuesday) invites women to be offended by the old school of thought that limited their lives to house hold chores. Once you have read some of these, it is important to let them go and allow your actions to create balance and equality.

This is a conversation between Dorothy Sayers in which she defends her ability to connect with her fellow man.  

 “A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves.

Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends?

I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five.

 "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing."

 I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings.

This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over.

 One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also.”  

 ― Dorothy L. Sayers,

Wonder Woman Extravaganza: Find Out How This Lady Helps Twitter

Computer Science if a field that eludes most people but Computer Scientist Carolyn Watters has managed to master and dedicate her life to the subject. Find out more about this amazing role model.

How did you get interested in computer science?

I always liked to solve problems. When I started computer science it was very brand new and math problem oriented and I thought that was cool so I decided I wanted to get into it.

Do you still enjoy your profession?

I love it. I like to solve puzzles and I like things that are a little fussy. I enjoy getting things just right. And I like to make a difference. There is always a puzzle out there to solve! It’s a perfect combination of all the things I like to do. It’s all out there just for our imaginations!

 Did you have much encouragement from your parents when you were growing up?

Umm..I wouldn’t say so. I got the usual objections, it was hard. I didn’t think it was hard though. And it was all men but at that time the class was made up of about 25% women. So it’s gone downhill. There are less women in computer sciences now actually.  But at that time, we were mostly encouraged by teachers to go into nursing.

 Any experiences where you felt out of place?

Yes, I did feel out of place at times. The first time I did any computing was my first day in my master’s program. The guys could all stay and work through the night but I would have to go home when it got late so I could catch the last bus, there was just no option for me to stay all night. That was a bit of an obstacle. And I think what separated me was the notion that to be really cool, you had to be obsessed with algorithms and that’s not why I enjoyed it.

 The culture around being obsessed with detail and spending all night fixing something, or even the idea of spending all night programing, made ME want to fall asleep. I liked it because it was about people and about how we solved problems with people. While most of the guys thought, ‘well that really isn’t computing, is it?’ I’ve seen a poster with a couple young women in scrubs, with a slogan saying ‘Go into medicine, you can really change the world’. And I thought why don’t we have that ad for computer science? Who writes this stuff?

 What are you working on right now?

Most of my work has been on tech stuff and electronic use. Right now, I’m working on a lot of social media. How do we get and use twitter feeds for things like news? It’s really interesting. It has that combination of people behaviour and problem solving.  We analyze what people do and I work on how that can affect streams of twitter. I look at the billions of tweets going by at a time and I think how can I quickly, in real time,  get only financial stories or how can I find everything going on about Trump.

 If we get it right, people will not have to go through the sea of twitter to find what they are looking for. Nor do we have to rely on those sources that agree with us. Because when we follow, we auto bias and get only people who are aligned with what we think. With this system, you would get all the information regarding what you were interested in.

 What advice would you give young girls who were thinking about careers in computers or were interested in the sciences?

Focus on what it is you want to do to change the world. And then don’t just take the same old paths even if you’re in math or computer science. When you’re doing your algorithms, you make it about what you care about. Let’s say you care about politics, you go out and make a website about helping people vote. Just go out and do it!

 What do you do for fun?

I love going out in my little boat. I love kayaking. I love hiking. I just like being outside.

Poem Of The Week: Hello, I am Science

My name is science,

You may have heard of me

That I have all the answers

Bursting Through me

Till this day I am unsure

Of if I will know it all

Till this day I don’t know

How to contain my thoughts so

But alas I have often been wrong

My experiments, tedious and long

Many facts I could tell you

But I’ll name just a few

Like a bolt of lightning is hotter than the sun

Jupiter’s the biggest planet, next comes Saturn

Don’t forget about chemistry, I know about that too!

I invented the colour spectrum,

Red, orange, green and blue!​

Poem Of The Week: The Kind Self

What if men and women alike,

Were content to sit and graze

Graze like cattle do

We could even play cattle games too

 Instead bombs and battle attend

We fight and we quarrel to the end

While the hole between us grows ever wide

Like parting seas or hidden valleys

 One day we will know

One day we will let love grow

And through that peaceful lens

We may yet find our kindest selves

 By: Jennifer Ladipo

Take Offence Tuesday: Female Deformity

Take Offence Tuesday is about appreciating the heights we have reached in just a few decades. It is easy to sometimes forget where we started but it is important to remind ourselves. TOT (Take Offence Tuesday) invites women to be offended by the old school of thought that limited their lives to house hold chores. Once you have read some of these, it is important to let them go and allow your actions to create balance and equality.

This is a short quote written by Aristotle who dominated the central school of thought during his era. He is notoriously known for some of his less feminist comments and it is nice to see that we have risen above a time when ideas like his were seen as fact.

Wonder Woman Extravaganza: A Chemical Engineer

 had the pleasure of interviewing Sophia He, a chemical engineering teacher at Dalhousie University. During the interview Sophia expressed a need to encourage more women in the field of engineering. Of all the STEM options, engineering is the field with the fewest women making up only fourteen percent of the employees that have careers in engineering.  

What did you want to be when you were growing up?

I don’t really remember what I wanted to be as a little girl but I do know in high school I wanted to be a chemist. Chemistry was so mysterious and it was everywhere. When it came time for college I did not know specifically what I wanted to do, I just loved chemistry. Here in Canada, during high school there are resources to help you choose the right path, there are guidance counsellors to help you in the process of choosing the right career. However, back in China there is not much guidance to help you understand what each profession involves."

 What was the toughest part of university?

 Well I chose chemical engineering thinking it was chemistry and in my first year I was unprepared for the level of math in engineering. I had never taken any calculus before and my first class was a disaster. After almost failing my calculus midterm, I studied all semester and I finally scored a 93% in my final. From then on I fell in love with engineering.”

 What do you love most about engineering?

 There are immediate benefits. Engineering is focused on application and that is the beauty of it. When I started working at the university I was immediately approached by a farmer who had a bio-diesel setup in his farm. I could improve and maximize his bio-diesel production after a few changes to his processing system. Now, I am working on converting old cooking oil into bio diesel. We will need alternative sources of energy in the future and if we can use waste, it will be an inexpensive alternative to coal or gas. There are also many engineering related jobs, there is a wide spectrum of fields that require an engineer like project management or energy consumption.

 What would you say to young girls who wanted to be engineers in the future?

I would tell young girls to be especially adventurous. Boys are raised to be brave and to push the limits, but girls are often taught to be a little gentler and demur. Girls are different in terms of the way they assess design, how they evaluate customer needs and how they solve problems. Girls should be just as brave and I think they would make fantastic engineers. In fact, I think women would make better engineers. They are very creative and good at solving different problems. I am currently a minority in my field and I would love to see more women in chemical engineering.

 This was a great interview as it shows how engineering can make a difference to peoples lives. In the future, we will need to have alternate sources of energy because we will run out of fossil fuels soon enough. These Wonder Women posts are here to create awareness about what Scientists and engineers do and it gives the chance for us to show case some of the brilliant women in the STEM fields.

 Comment, Like & Share! Do You Know Someone In The STEM fields?! 

Understanding the profession of these role models in important when trying to stimulate creativity and learning for the sciences. 

Poem Of The Week: Be It Yellow

Be it Yellow,

And be it Blue

Allow Laughter

To Bubble From You

Be it red

Or be it green

Let Your Light

Gleam and gleam

Be it orange 

And be it brown 

Never Let Life 

Get You Down 

Be it purple 

Or be it pink 

The World is Ours 

Or So We Think 

How I Came To Love Engineering

My first flight as a kid was to Amsterdam and the pilot was a hilarious man with an accent I could not get enough of and I fell in love with the whole flight experience.

 I couldn’t get enough of the idea that I was in the air like a bird! I decided I would be a pilot! I can still remember my mother saying in her ever practical Caribbean fashion, “As long as you are fine not seeing me or anyone in your family because you’ll be in the air all the time…”? My mother may have exaggerated to keep her only daughter out of the air but it certainly did the trick! I no longer wanted to be a pilot.

 #Monkey See, Monkey Do!

When I go to Grade 9 both my brothers were in school for engineering and I had always copied everything they did. I discovered aeronautic engineering and it sounded like the perfect substitute to being a pilot! It did not hurt that my brothers were encouraging and If they could do it, I certainly could! I was always better at school in any place.  

 With a ton of encouragement from my parents and high school grades in the mid 80’s, I went into my first year of engineering assuming it would be easy enough to get good grades. Boy, was I wrong.

 First Year Failure!

 Like a few people, I was one of those students who took the idea of “freedom” in university to heart. I was never a partier but I developed a habit far worse…I was lazier than a sloth. I skipped class and thought I could just catch up just like I had in high school.

I did not have exemplary grades in my first year and when second year rolled around with the same set of C’s, D’s, and E’s I sat down and evaluated what I wanted. Did I want to be an engineer? Was it that hard or was I not putting in enough effort?  

 #Starting Again

After almost changing majors and taking a year off, I started the process all over again and I am so glad I stuck it out! Over the years, I have come to love engineering for more than the math and science it is painted to be, but for the diverse critical thinking skills it teaches you.

 Skills that come in handy when trying to solve every day problems. I thought it was a perfect profession for women who could bring a much-needed social aspect to the profession. However, in my years in school the number of women who enrolled has visibly shrunk and this genuinely bothered me.

 I started doing some research and realized that women made up 59% percent of undergraduate degree holders but only 23% are in engineering. The numbers get worse when we look at computer science in particular. With further research, I realized the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) community is having trouble retaining women in most fields within that spectrum.

 For the next year and a half, I researched, wrote papers and found that if I wanted change I would have to do something! The lack of women in STEM affects us all and in the long run your daughter’s ARE smart enough and their uniqueness IS an asset not a disadvantage!

Through this website, I will debunk some famous myths about boys and girls, give advice on raising your best girls and as a whole just trying to encourage women all over the world in their educational pursuits!

Poem Of The Week: An Ode To Polymers

Polymers are substances that are made up of long repeated atoms bonded together. Polymers are used often to make plastics, rubber and glue! For my chemistry class in second year, we were allowed to hand in a creative bonus project and this was mine! Hope you enjoy!