Happy International Women’s Day March 8, 2016!

The UK’s Medical Research Council’s Clinical Science Centre and  Imperial College have found an interesting way to celebrate   International Women’s Day 2016 according to a March 8, 2016 posting by Stuart Clark for the Guardian (Note: Links have been removed),

Tonight [March 8, 2016] at the Royal Society, London, around a dozen women will be presented with Suffrage Science awards. Organised by the Medical Research Council’s Clinical Science Centre, Imperial College, they honour women’s contributions to science and are timing to coincide with International Women’s Day.

One of today’s awardees is Pippa Goldschmidt. She is being honoured for her work in science communication. With a PhD in astronomy, …

Her latest project is editing the short story collection I Am Because You Are. These stories all take their inspiration from Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, which is currently celebrating its 100th anniversary.

What can fiction bring to science?

Science is too often a closed book for many people, they study it at school and are bored by it, or find it difficult or irrelevant to their lives. But fiction has this incredible ability to reflect and examine all aspects of the real world, and writing fiction about science is a great way of opening it up to new audiences, and helping to demystify it.

Science is also heavily reliant on literary concepts, such as metaphors, to get its points across; we often hear the phrases ‘the Universe is like an expanding balloon’, or ‘DNA is like an alphabet’. So I think fiction and science have more in common with each other than may first appear.

Should you be able to attend, I’d be delighted to hear more about the event.

Next, I have a March 8, 2016 article by Lauren J. Young on Inverse.com (Note: Links have been removed),

Women have achieved a lot throughout history. That’s why today, on March 8, thousands of events are taking place in more than 40 countries across the world to celebrate International Women’s Day. This year’s theme is Planet 50-50 by 2030: Step it up for Gender Equality, alluding to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals — a 15-year plan for growth and development in all countries including gender equality and education for all.

International Women’s Day dates back to February 28, 1909, when the Socialist Party of America observed it for the first time in the United States, and two years later, the leader of the Women’s Office for Germany’s Social Democratic Party, Clara Zetkin, expanded the idea internationally. It gained support by the United Nations in 1975, which strengthened the movement.

International Women’s Day is also a day to celebrate science: The United Nations created an interactive timeline documenting some of the most significant contributions made by women. Here are the three:

In Ancient Greece, Agnodice was one of the first female gynecologists. She risked her life to practice medicine even though women who were caught were sentenced to death.

You can find the UN timeline here.

Finally, the UN has a separate International Day of Women and Girls in Science celebrated on Feb. 11 (presumably of each year).

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