Reckoning with our Mistakes
By Jen Schwartz and Dan Schlenoff,
Scientific American
| 08. 19. 2020
An article about women engineers, published in 1908, has a promising start: If women are attending technical schools and are not legally blocked from working in a forge or firm, why do they face so many obstacles to employment? A reader in 2020 who discovers such a socially progressive question in the archives of Scientific American anticipates a discussion of sex discrimination. Perhaps women such as Emily Warren Roebling, who took over her husband's role as chief engineer on construction of the Brooklyn Bridge after he became bedridden, will be held up for their contributions to the field. Surely the article will feature the voice of Nora Stanton Barney, who had recently fought to become the first woman accepted as a junior member in the American Society of Civil Engineers and was active in the suffrage movement.
Alas, no. Author Karl Drews explains it simply: the obstacles “are inherent in the nature of the case and are due to women's comparative weakness, both bodily and mental.” He elaborates: “The work of the engineer is creative in the highest sense of...
Related Articles
By Emma Belmonte, ChinaFile | 10.03.2025
On the popular Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, also known as RedNote, an account called “Georgia Notes” (@格鲁吉亚小纸条) offers tips and advice to Chinese nationals planning a trip to the Republic of Georgia. In one post...
By Daniel Hildebrand, The Humanist | 10.01.2025
When most people hear the word eugenics, they think of dusty history textbooks and black-and-white photographs: forced sterilizations in the early 20th century, pseudoscientific charts measuring skulls, the language of “fitness” used to justify violence and exclusion. It feels like...
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Maya Tekeli, The New York Times | 09.24.2025
For some Greenlanders, sorry isn’t enough.
The prime minister of Denmark, Mette Frederiksen, made a special visit Wednesday to Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, to apologize in person for a traumatic chapter in Greenlandic history, when Danish doctors forced birth control on...
By Emma McDonald Kennedy
| 09.25.2025
In the leadup to the 2024 election, Donald Trump repeatedly promised to make IVF more accessible. He made the commitment central to his campaign, even referring to himself as the “father of IVF.” In his first month in office, Trump issued an executive order promising to expand IVF access. The order set a 90-day deadline for policy recommendations for “lowering costs and reducing barriers to IVF,” although it didn’t make any substantive reproductive healthcare policy changes.
The response to the...