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Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who…
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Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World (original 2016; edition 2016)

by Rachel Ignotofsky (Author)

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1,2352815,613 (4.49)22
Great summary well illustrated and made interesting to read and to look at... ( )
  Brightman | Feb 3, 2019 |
English (24)  Spanish (2)  Italian (1)  German (1)  All languages (28)
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A must for anyone interested in scientific achievement as well as in women who made incredible contributions to knowledge and society's well-being and improvement.

The graphic (short) profile format is engaging (and stunning!) without sacrificing any depth or breadth of information ( )
  schoenbc70 | Sep 2, 2023 |
This is a book worthy of one's coffee table. Set it out and let people (preferably kids) discover it! Our girls are older and I wish we had this book many years ago when we would spend some time before going to bed each night reading together. Say, one scientist a night.

I read this book a few scientists at a time and I don't believe it's written in such a way to make it a cover-to-cover-don't-put-it-down-read. There are some sources at the end of the book along with a glossary, but the information isn't cited like a scholarly work. There are more detailed citations on the web but again, the citations aren't done in a scholarly way. You won't be able to directly attach sources to the information. I understand why it wasn't done in the book because of the intended audience, however I would like to see more careful citations on the web.

I enjoyed the presentation style and unlike other people I didn't find the type too small to read. ( )
  alan_chem | Feb 28, 2023 |
This book contains mini biographies of fifty women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Some are famous, such as Marie Curie, and others are lesser known. The book is short, so it does not provide much depth about each individual, but I enjoyed seeing so many women of science accumulated in one place. It gives the reader a sense of the many obstacles these women faced. I read this book as a precursor to reading more in depth about women in STEM. It definitely served my intended purpose.


( )
  Castlelass | Oct 30, 2022 |
'The women in this book prove to the world that no matter your gender, your race, or your background, anyone can achieve great things.'

This book is so inspiring to me now that I wish I could go back in time and give this book to ten year old me because it would have made an even bigger impact to me then. It really does show that you can do anything no matter who you are. I'm going to keep recommending this book to parents and kids alike despite their gender. You don't have to be female to be inspired by this wonderful book, but I do think it's an excellent opportunity to show young girls that they don't have to follow gender norms with their careers. This is definitely going to be my big recommendation this Christmas to anyone who comes into the children's department. ( )
  sianhopper | Dec 6, 2021 |
Short children's book about women in science but it was fascinating. I learned about several women I had never even heard of and that interested me enough to seek out full length books about them. I recommend this book as a great starting point for those wanting to learn more about this subject. ( )
  KateKat11 | Sep 24, 2021 |
Women in Science is a wonderful board book that features women through history and throughout the world who have contributed to science. Going chronologically through time, beginning with Hypatia, each page features a stylistically drawn scientist surrounded by tools of their trade and notes about their accomplishments and work in their field from simple to more complex. Women in Science includes women from different backgrounds, ethnicities and religions for a diverse grouping. Women in Science also showcases a variety of sciences from Math, Astronomy, Geology, Physics, Chemistry, Computer Science, Psychiatry, Biology and Ophthalmology. Children and adults will find something to love in this book.
This book was received for free in return for an honest review. ( )
  Mishker | Aug 8, 2021 |
LOVE IT SO SO MUCH! BUY IT TO ALL THE GIRLS YOU KNOW
- from a girl about to study science at uni ( )
  aquapages | Jul 8, 2020 |
A collection of 50 female scientists. ( )
  haileybrevik | Feb 23, 2020 |
This is one of those books I plan on reading to my future kids. It's important in every single way and I believe that everyone should read this. ( )
  ladyofliterature | Jan 9, 2020 |

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Not only is Women in Science by Rachel Ignotofsky an amazingly gorgeous book full unique illustrations, but it also is such an empowering, yet fun read. I cannot believe there hasn’t been a book like this out on the market before. This is definitely something every parent should buy for their middle school daughter.

I myself learned about so many women that made amazing contributions in the STEM fields, I was just blown away. It really makes me wish that I had had a book like this encouraging me to stick with math as a youngster instead of being led to believe math and engineering were “boy things” and “boy jobs.”

The best thing about this book is that it also includes Women of Color. Not as many as I would like, but some is better than none. Progress is slow, sadly, but coming. Please, if you have a daughter, a niece, a grand-daughter, pick up Women in Science by Rachel Ignotofsky for them. Give them the encouragement that they can be anything that they want and that there are no such borders between men and women’s jobs.


// I received this title for free in exchange for an honest review // ( )
  heylu | Jan 8, 2020 |
"Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World", by Rachel Ignotofsky, is a truly delightful book--it is both educational and entertaining. The author also provided the charming and quaint illustrations featured on the cover and throughout the book. Fifty women of science are given a spotlight, and over a dozen more are also nicely acknowledged. This is a work of wonder, enlightening and inspiring to all ages and genres. Among the more well-known ladies are Marie Curie, Lillian Gilbreth, Alice Ball, Rachel Carson, Jane Goodall, and Hedy Lamarr. While best known as a Hollywood star, and often referred to as "the most beautiful woman in the world", Ms. Lamarr was also quite the inventor. Her creation, FHSS (frequency-hopping spread spectrum), was not only used by our military to control torpedoes and communications, it is also the basis for the technology used today with smartphones, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth devices. Equally impressive and amazing are the endeavors and accomplishments of all the women of science. None of these ladies took no for an answer, they never gave up on what they believed, and the world will always be a better place for their magnificent efforts. Women and girls will be encouraged and motivated, and men and boys will be impressed and awed. This is science for everyone—it’s great to be a geek!

Book Copy Gratis Ten Speed Press via Blogging for Books ( )
  gincam | Mar 31, 2019 |
Great summary well illustrated and made interesting to read and to look at... ( )
  Brightman | Feb 3, 2019 |
I really liked this book. It is a short look at 50 women scientists, mathematicians, etc who changed the world. Each individual gets two pages - one is a short biopic, the other is an illustration with some additional facts. While I knew who some of the women were, I'd not heard of nearly enough of them. I will definitely be looking out for some longer, in depth books about some of these fantastic women. This book is great for what it is - a short look at some very amazing women that every person should know. ( )
  kateprice88 | Jul 19, 2018 |
This book introduces us to fifty women in the field of science. The different fields of science range from technology, engineering, and mathematics. This book not only introduces young readers to women in science, but it also introduces them to relevant topics such as: lab equipment, rates of women currently working in STEM fields, and a scientific glossary. This book celebrates the women who paved the way for the next generation of female engineers, biologists, doctors, astronauts, and more. I think this book is so important for young girls. When we think of science we automatically think of males, and that should not be the case. There are so many women in science that we need to introduce to girls AND boys. I think this book would be really cool to have in my classroom library because it really is fascinating learning about the different women in science. I would even do a project where everyone chooses on person from the book and we do a mini biography day! ( )
  aquinn | Apr 23, 2018 |
I got this book from a co-worker to read. This was a very well done book that has brief biographies of 50 women in science. It's put together very nicely and in a way that should be accessible to all ages.

The majority of the book is comprised of two page spreads on different women who made significant contributions to science in some way. These sections are interspersed with small sections on stats about women in STEM careers and descriptions of different scientific equipment

I loved all the fun facts shown on the pages and I enjoyed the illustration style and how fun and colorful it was.

My only small complaint is that I wish that instead of a characterized sketch there had been an actual photo of the woman in question included. I just feel like this would have showed the variety of types of women who work in science and emphasized the fact that it’s not how you look, it’s what you do that’s important.

Overall I really enjoyed this! This would be a great read for anyone; especially good for girls and women who are interested in science. This is one of the best books I have seen about women in science. It does a great job of highlighting these women’s lives in a brief page space. ( )
  krau0098 | Apr 16, 2018 |
This book is so kick-ass I'm pretty sure the Lumberjanes would be die hard fans of it. Each biography is a short easy page to read and the illustrations are amazing. It made me want to go out there and do some badass stuff in science which I love. It's a book that will hopefully inspire many girls from different backgrounds that there are so many different fields of science and not to be ashamed if you enjoy them! ( )
  IntrovertedBooks | Mar 26, 2018 |
This book introduces dozens of women in science that you probably didn't learn about in school. I think this would be a great reading choice for middle school age kids. Each brief biography is a perfect jumping off point for further research.

I was irked by some of the descriptions they used when talking about spaceflight related topics. For example, the entry on Katherine Johnson refers to the Apollo CSM-LM as the Apollo-Shuttle. WTF? Shuttle is entirely the wrong word to use here. The entry on Valentina Tereshkova's talks about her flight on the Shuttle called Vostok IV. Again, WTF? Vostok capsules are the technical opposite of a Shuttle. For some reason, the entry on Jocelyn Bell Burnell mentioned she had a cat named Vostok, allegedly named after the first satellites. No satellites were ever called Vostok. The first Soviet manned spacecraft were named Vostok. Satellites had various names, including Sputnik, but Vostok was definitely not one of them.

The sloppy work here definitely took away from my enjoyment of this. There were some glaring spelling errors, too. ( )
  LISandKL | Jan 2, 2018 |
I wish my teachers read more books about women and science! Another book I will have to get for my classroom. The art was really great, and there were a lot of(most actually) women I had never heard of, which was really cool. It also had women in technology, math, and engineering, which is great. ( )
  epatt14 | Sep 10, 2017 |
This was a wonderful introduction to women scientists that I think everyone would benefit from reading. The presentation is very attractive and colorful, with full page graphics, quick facts and quotes for each person as well as a short biography. A lot of great information proving that women have made many wonderful contributions to the science world in all areas, and that many were risk takers and determined to persevere in the face of discouragement. I really enjoyed learning about these fascinating women and their discoveries. I think it would be a great addition to classrooms to peak students interest in the different scientific fields. ( )
  shaunesay | Jun 21, 2017 |
This book about great women scientists is also very much about great overlooked women scientists. Some of the telling sentences you will see in this book are: “Rosalind [Franklin] is remembered as a woman who should have won a Nobel prize.” And, “Despite Cecilia’s accomplishments [Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin discovered the sun is made mostly of hydrogen and helium gas], being a woman meant she was only recognized as a technical assistant at Harvard.” And “Unfortunately, [Nettie Stevens, who discovered XX and XY chromosomes] [was] largely overlooked and forgotten.”

In fact, you will probably not recognize the names of most of these women, even though they made great discoveries. Rather, the men who worked with them or came after them got the credit. Fortunately, as the book moves forward in time, that trend changed, but not hugely; we are still more familiar with male scientists than females. This book seeks to change that pattern.

Fifty women get double-page spreads in this book, with clever illustrations by the author accompanying each profile. (At the end of the book there is an “addendum” with short blurbs on “More Women In Science.”) They are arranged chronologically by date of birth, beginning with the ancient astronomer, mathematician, and philosopher Hypatia in the fourth century and ending with Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani, born in 1977. Each history includes background, achievements, quotes, reputation at the time, and legacy.

For example, in the sketch on Maria Goeppert-Mayer, Theoretical Physicist, we learn:

“[She] worked most of her life for little or no pay. Despite this, she solved one of the great mysteries of the universe.”

Born in Germany, Goeppert-Mayer was one of the “physics superstars” at the University of Göttingen, but when she and her husband immigrated to the U.S., only he was offered a position. Johns Hopkins did, however, let her set up a lab in an abandoned attic, where she worked for nine years without pay and did research resulting in ten publications on physics, quantum mechanics, and chemistry.

Because of the need for her intellectual skills during the race to create an atomic bomb, she finally got a job. She went on to prove the nuclear shell model explaining how isotopes behave that is now taught to every student. In 1963 she was awarded the Nobel prize in physics. But does anyone outside of physics know her name?

There are side graphics by each story also, featuring interesting facts and trivia about each person. To return to Goeppert-Mayer, she love smoking so much she often smoked two cigarettes at once! Grace Hopper, Navy Admiral and computer scientist, had a Jolly Roger pirate flag on her desk, we learn, because she was relentless in getting what her team needed. She also appeared on the David Letterman show. Gertrude Elion, a pharmacologist who created drugs for gout, singles, and herpes, started out as chemist testing pickles for grocery stores.

The women profiled represent a wide range of interests and accomplishments, and come from a variety of nationalities.

The book is enhanced by not only the marvelous illustrations by Ignotofsky, but a timeline, statistics in STEM (acronym for the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), a glossary of scientific terms, and a list of additional sources.

Evaluation: This terrific book will provide inspiration and enlightenment for all ages. ( )
  nbmars | Oct 8, 2016 |
Very inspiring! is one way to describe “Women in Science,” an awesome new book by Rachel Ignotofsky. Reading this reminded me why I wanted to be a scientist in the first place. The excitement of discovery, defying the status quo, and the positive impact of applying scientific findings to benefit communities. Not only were these women brilliant scientists, they worked just as hard to advance social causes, and to apply their findings to the betterment of humanity.

I can’t review this book without comparing it with “Headstrong” by Rachel Swaby, whose blurb is featured on the back cover. I even thought of a use of the Venn diagram, to show the overlap in number of women chronicled in the two books. Three (Maria Mitchell, Irène Juliot-Curie, and Sally Ride) also appear in the back, among “more women in science.” A notable inclusion here is Marie Curie, a direct influence for some of the other scientists here. Another significant inclusion is some pioneers who are still living. Fortunately, there are so many more women in science now, and I hope their numbers continue to grow. Ignotofsky’s featured women helped make this possible.

I only have a few minor critiques, mostly just personal preferences on style. The pages are glossy, for fear of getting fingerprints on them, and a few sections seem almost a little cluttered, but there are lots of little related elements that make for an attentive image. The consistent format has the highlighted life story of each of these 50 women on two facing pages, several paragraphs on the right, with three-to-four factoids on either side. The left page has a central drawing of the subject, and with additional writing looping around, and pictures of the things they studied, all in a single color theme. The names in the header on the right are a little hard to read sometimes, due to multiple parallel lines, but what counts is that Ignotofsky has her own style. She is an effective communicator of science and an original artist, and I look forward to seeing more of her work.

Note: I received a free copy of this title through BloggingForBooks in exchange for an honest review. For more reviews, follow my blog at http://matt-stats.blogspot.com/ ( )
2 vote MattCembrola | Aug 24, 2016 |
From Ada Lovelace to Wang Zhenyi: A Celebration of Women Scientists

(Full disclosure: I received a free book for review through Blogging for Books.)

It's made to believe
Women are the same as men;
Are you not convinced
Daughters can also be heroic?

- Wang Zhenyi

"Nothing says trouble like a woman in pants."

If there's a girl in your life who's into science - be it astronomy, psychology, or paleontology; even just a little! we're talking the teeniest, tiniest bit! - you need to introduce her to the work of Rachel Ignotofsky. A graphic artist/illustrator, Ignotofsky uses her art to "make learning exciting." Her first book, Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World, is a mashup of her many passions: art, history, science, and feminism - namely, celebrating the many contributions (many of them overlooked by and even erased from history) women have made to their respective scientific fields. The result is a smart, inspirational book that's both informative and lovely.

Ada Lovelace. Elizabeth Blackwell. Marie Curie. Rachel Carson. Jane Goodall. Some of the women profiled here have managed, against all odds, to claim their rightful places as household names. But have you heard of Wang Zhenyi, 18th century astronomer, mathematician, and poet? How about Mamie Pipps Clark, a psychologist and civil rights activist who, along with her husband, conducted the infamous (and devastating) Doll Experiment, thus helping to end segregation in public schools? Or Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the Irish astrophysicist who discovered pulsars at the age of 24?

As if these achievements aren't impressive enough on their own, consider that many of these women did so even when they were barred from higher education, prohibited from publishing papers, or even expected to obey their fathers and husbands, no matter the cost. (Prior to 1974, women couldn't apply for a line of credit; abortion was not legalized until 1973, and even today it can be difficult for low-income women to access; and marital rape wasn't recognized as a crime federally until 1993.)

Of course, women of color face(d) even more barriers than their white counterparts: slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and voter disenfranchisement, to name a few that are discussed here. Just as the fight for women's rights factors heavily into the histories included here, in her profiles of African-American scientists - Mamie Pipps Clark, Katherine Johnson, Jane Cooke Wright, Annie Easley, Patricia Bath, and Mae Jemison - abolition, civil rights, and anti-racism play a large role as well. In addition to being a computer programmer, mathematician, and honest-to-goodness rocket scientist, Annie Easley taught her fellow black Alabamians how to ace Jim Crow voting tests - and also tutored under-privileged city kids in her spare time. In 1992, Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman in space; she famously credits Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura as a role model, thus illustrating the importance of representation in pop culture. (Enter: Women in Science! How meta!)

While there's definitely an American bent to Women in Science, Ignotofsky includes women scientists from all over the world: Australia, Austria, China, Egypt, England, France, Germany, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Norway, Poland, Prague, and Russia. There's a fair amount of ethnic and racial diversity, which is awesome, and I also love that Jane Goodall, primatologist and animal rights activist, gets a nod.

Each profile is short - just a single page opposite a page of artwork - yet Ignotofsky manages to pack a ton of information in there, including in cute little scribbles and doodles in the margins. The art is whimsical and rendered in rich, vibrant colors; it's so gorgeous I could all but eat it with my eyeballs. The sheer eye-catchiness makes this book great for kids, but adults are also sure to love it: it's astute, stirring, and all but guaranteed to hit you right in the feels. (Three words: Wang Zhenyi's poetry.)

I'm really looking forward to her next book, a guided journal called I Love Science: A Journal for Self-Discovery and Big Ideas, due out in March 2017. Ignotofsky's artwork is perfectly suited for the journal format, and I've never heard of a journal quite like it. Probably these two together would make a really shiny gift for science-curious geek girls.

http://www.easyvegan.info/2016/08/24/women-in-science-by-rachel-ignotofsky/ ( )
1 vote smiteme | Aug 8, 2016 |
A charmingly illustrated and educational book, New York Times best seller Women in Science highlights the contributions of fifty notable women to the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) from the ancient to the modern world. Full of striking, singular art, this fascinating collection also contains infographics about relevant topics such as lab equipment, rates of women currently working in STEM fields, and an illustrated scientific glossary. The trailblazing women profiled include well-known figures like primatologist Jane Goodall, as well as lesser-known pioneers such as Katherine Johnson, the African-American physicist and mathematician who calculated the trajectory of the 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon. (amazon.com)
  CDJLibrary | Jan 3, 2021 |
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  OakGrove-KFA | Mar 28, 2020 |
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