Attending women’s and other gender equality conferences and events is one little step. Firstly and more importantly, they should educate themselves about gender inequality and the barriers women face throughout their studies and careers. So, how can men be allies? There are several things men can do to be part of the change.

Also, research shows that 96% of the companies where men are actively involved in gender equality report greater progress in achieving gender parity ( BCG Gender Diversity Survey 2017). But Pickering proved that having women in your team can lead to great achievements. Women are still believed not to be good at STEM fields, not good as leaders, not good enough to get paid the same money as men. How different are things from that time? Unfortunately not much has changed. Pickering could not achieve what he did without the important work of those women and he was perceived as a man-ally and progressive for his time (even though his women employees were still paid less than the men!). Unfortunately, a lot of men are still either unaware of the gender gap and its impact, or not interested in gender equality matters thinking that it’s not their problem and there is nothing they can do. We agreed that it is impossible to change the current gender balance picture, especially in STEM environments, unless we make sure that men are part of the effort. One of the main points that our discussion moved around was the importance of men being allies to women in order to achieve gender equality. This is the story of the book (“The Glass Universe” by Dava Sobel) we discussed last Monday at the Women in STEM book club that I organise and moderate in Edinburgh. Pickering was a progressive thinker for his time a time when women were expected to devote their energy to breeding and homemaking, and education was believed to be bad for them. Have you ever heard of Edward Charles Pickering? During Pickering’s tenure as director of the Harvard Observatory (1877 – 1919), more than 80 women were hired by him in order to compute and catalogue massive amounts of data, which then provided the empirical foundations for larger astronomical theories.

The glass universe