When Schoolgirls Interact With Scientists

Nandita Jayaraj

February 20, 4:41 pm

There are far too few occasions in an Indian student’s life where they are exposed to real scientists, much less, women scientists.

Schoolchildren aside, even the average adult would really struggle to name a female scientist working in this country. Credit: The Life of Science

“Can you name three Indian scientists for me?”

“Abdul Kalam… C.V. Raman… J.C. Bose… Kalpana Chawla… Chandrasekharan…”

“OK, OK. Now can you name three Indian female scientists?”

*silence* “Kalpana Chawla!” “Marie… no, no, she said Indian…”

I was addressing about 80 energetic and boisterous school girls from class 8-12 and their teachers who had come along to chaperone them. It was February 11, the International Day for Women and Girls in Science. I had been invited by the Institute of Mathematical Sciences (IMSc, popularly known as MatScience) in Chennai to speak to these young students about some of the women Aashima and I have met in the course of The Life of Science project.

There are far too few occasions in an Indian student’s life where they are exposed to real scientists, much less, women scientists. That minute of cluelessness that followed my question reinforced the need for such interactions in Indian schools.

Kids aside, even the average adult would really struggle to name a female scientist working in this country. Nevertheless, it was quite telling that nobody in the audience – not students, nor the teachers – remembered and thought of yelling out the names of the speakers that had spoken minutes before me. Both were scientists – Dr. Manjari Bagchi, an astronomer and Dr. Varuni P. a biologist – and each had just spent thirty minutes talking about their research.

Sushmita V.’s session – Surface area of sphere, a 2000-year-old proof. Credit: The Life of Science

That’s how unfamiliar the idea of a ‘female scientist’ still is in our minds. The MatScience community is fortunately aware of this imbalance and hence jumped at the opportunity to host this event. “Girls need to first see themselves as scientists, see women as scientists,” stressed Dr. Ramanujam, a computer scientist at IMSc in an interaction with the school teachers later that day.

During the rest of my talk, I watched the girls lean forward in their seats as I told them the story of a neuroscientist called Vidita who is trying to understand emotions, an arachnologist named Elizabeth who goes looking for a special species of spider and a seismologist called Kusala who used an ancient poem to lead her to the site of a 1,000-year-old earthquake. Later, one of the kids came up to me and said this was the first time she enjoyed hearing about scientists. “Usually, it’s so boring.”

The MatScience community’s philosophy of science being something you do, not just read, remained the essence throughout the day’s events. It was evident when Dr. Varuni P. a postdoctoral researcher and outreach activities coordinator at MatScience engaged the students in a group activity. In a snap of a finger (literally), they found themselves demonstrating how bacterial cultures exponentially grow. There was more “doing” in the talk by Dr. Shweta Agarwal who studies cryptography at IIT-Madras. Agarwal summoned three young volunteers to demonstrate cryptographic techniques using the analogy of telling secrets.