Women are unsung inventors and creators
These are excerpts from Part one of my book: Venus Genius: The Female Prescription for Innovation.
It has been proven that women are great inventors and creators according to history, although most are not recognized as such.
Did you know that Grace Hopper invented the compiler that translated written language into computer code and designed Harvard’s Mark I computer, a five-ton, room-size machine, in 1944?
Katherine Johnson is the brilliant mind behind the success of NASA first U.S. manned space flight, as her calculations played a crucial role in it.
She was finally rewarded Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 at 96 years old. Her achievements became more popular thanks to the 2016 movie Hidden Figures. The movie highlights how hard she had to fight with her colleagues to be listened to as women of color, despite their brilliancy and significant contributions.
A recurrent theme is how women’s inventions were attributed to men — not that they did it intentionally, it was just the way society was. Widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer, Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace was a 19th century mathematician and writer. She paved the way for Alan Turing’s work on the first modern computers during World War II.
She worked with a partner, inventor Charles Babbage, and the two came up with an idea for an “Analytical Machine.” In 1843, she wrote notes that basically were the invention of computer programming. But for years historians assumed that Babbage had written them.
Born in 1915, Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler was an Austrian actress better known as Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr. She was the epitome of beauty — she also was a prolific inventor. During World War II, she invented and patented a frequency-hopping signal that was impossible to hack, to avoid radio-controlled torpedoes to be knocked off course. She invented wireless communication, but the U.S. government refused to take her seriously.
The U.S. Navy classified her original patent and filed it away — until they gradually began developing technologies based on it, with zero credit to her.
Given the Equality of Opportunity Project research finding that innovation ability does not vary substantially across all groups, this result implies there are many “lost Einsteins” among the under-represented groups: people who would have had high-impact inventions had they had the opportunity to become inventors. Many of those are women: if girls were as exposed to female inventors as boys are to male inventors, the gender gap in innovation would fall by half.
We therefore have a backlog of great innovators with women.
It is also true in another domain at the intersection of creativity and invention: art.
Suzanne Valadon was known for modeling for Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, though she was an artist herself. Camille Claudel was an exceptionally talented artist, but as a woman, she couldn’t make a name of her own. She had to collaborate with Auguste Rodin and let him get the credit as the ‘lionized figure of French sculptures’. Rodin obviously signed a number of her works.
This is how Laure Adler, journalist, author and historian, introduces her book: The Trouble with Women Artists- Reframing the History of Art. I love it because you can replace the word ‘art’ with ‘innovation’:
“One is not born an artist, but rather becomes one. Since its beginnings, the history of art has been conceived, written, published, and taught by men. And when you are born as a women, being an artist is a perilous, never-ending fight, and physically, intellectually and mentally exhausting. Today, the time has come to reframe and reexamine the creative works of those women who have had the courage to defy the rules in order to fulfill their calling”.
While giving women a larger role in innovation would be just and fair, even more importantly it would inspire younger women and give them the confidence that they can innovate.
Over the next weeks, I’m going to be sharing excerpts and stories from Part one of my book, Venus Genius in this article series. Venus Genius launched on December 7, 2020 on Amazon, here is the link to buy it: https://lnkd.in/dXbs_WK! If you want to connect, you can reach me here via email: contact@innoveve.com or connect with me on social: www.linkedin.com/in/fabienne-jacquet — https://www.facebook.com/innoveveLLC — @innoveveLLC.
