CONTRIBUTION OF WOMEN IN SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNICAL INNOVATIONS.

Today we are seeing for more participation by women in the technical fields.The percentage of women in engineering has increased by about 70 percent in the past ten years--meaning women now represent about 15 persent of the total engineers in the U.S. Despite nearly 40 years of activism by the women's movement, ongoing research shows that many young girls are still getting the message, it's okay to do poorly in math and science, and we still see parents,teachers, and school advisors discourage female students from pursuing academic and career interest in science and engineering,as not suitable or too difficult.

But in reality,there have always been women who applied their common sense and natural abilities to contribute to their world through scientific and technical innovations.A few have been well-known for many generations, to be trotted out and displayed as examples of the rare and exceptional--and depending on who is speaking, may be even the aberrant--female scientists or inventors.But more thorough research most often by women,is revealing amuch larger heritage of women active in technology than was previously realized.

One area in which recent scholarship shows women to be prolific is invention.It is ironic that the concept of women as inventors has been belittled--or ignored--by so many of western history's male scholars, since it is women by male definitions who are seen as intuitive,and invention often reflects an intuitive leap to discover a solution to a problem.