50 Women in Technology

＂[In the laboratory] they thought I was the new janitor.＂ - Clarice Phelps, Nuclear Chemist.

＂Why do I get a tenth of the funding that men that have projects at large corporations do?＂ - Mary Lou Jepsen, inventor.

＂I asked ’why isn’t there a girl character for me to choose from?’ At first, they laughed. Then, they got annoyed at me and started having design meetings and not tell me where they were.＂ - Sheri Graner Ray, videogame designer.

＂My surname is Andrew, so people kept asking who was this Andrew that I collaborated with and if he was the one who did the technology side of my work.＂ - Gretchen Andrew, NFT Artist.

Women have fought their way to the top in fields that have been male dominated for years, yet, they still face challenges in gaining investment, being acknowledged as experts and being included at the highest level. With the growth in AI it is more important than ever that women’s voices are heard to avert the inherent sex bias and misogyny of our culture being perpetuated. 50 Women in Technology sheds light on the work of forgotten pioneers who defied expectations and broke new ground working in health, IT, maths, genetics, astronomy and many others.

It also includes 25 exclusive interviews with women who are at the forefront today, developing new products and making discoveries in the fast-paced world of technology including: Amalia Ballarino (Nuclear Engineer), Ana Oliveira (Crop Genetics), Anaïs Engelmann and Meghan Hale (Design Engineering), Anda Waluyo Sapardan (Medical Tech/Healthcare), Anna Lukasson-Herzig (Computing/AI), Brenda Romero (Video Games), Clarice Phelps (Nuclear Chemist), Claudia Brind -Woody (IT), Emily Holmes (Neuroscientist). Gretchen Andrew (NFT Artist), Ida Tin (FemTech), Kasia Gora (Food Tech), Liza Velarde (Healthcare), Marita Cheng (Robotics), Mary Lou Jepsen (Imaging/Healthcare), Odunayo Eweniyi (Financial Tech), Rumman Chowdhury (Internet Algorithms/Data Science), Sheri Graner Ray (Videogames), Stephanie Willerth, (Bioengineering), Tan Le (Medical Tech) and Yewande Akinola (Sustainability).

Georgina is a science writer, biographer, author and broadcaster. She lives in Oxford, UK, and writes about science and scientists past and present. She writes mainly about the life sciences, then and now, and also has a particular interest in women in science. She is fascinated by the lives of scientists and their interactions with the society in which they live.

Since 2018 she has made something of a speciality of writing scientific obituaries which include: Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (Granta 1998); The Common Thread: A story of science, politics, ethics and the human genome with John Sulston (Bantam 2002); A computer called LEO: Lyons Teashops and the world’s first office computer (Fourth Estate 2003); Max Perutz and the Secret of Life (Chatto & Windus 2007); EMBO in perspective: A half-century in the life sciences (EMBO 2014)