Honoring Women

With March being Women’s History Month, I decided to take a look back at the women honored in this blog. I sensed that an inordinate number of posts were about women, and I feared that they hadn’t appeared in my book New York City Firsts because I had done a poor job of research. Had I not delved deeply enough to identify original contributions made by women?

I discovered that almost one third of the blog posts have been about women. Roughly the same number have been about events. The number of posts about women was slightly more than the number about men, but not substantially so. As a percentage of all people featured in the medium, however, far more women have appeared in the blog than in the book.

I give a webinar called Unheralded Pioneers of New York. It focuses on people mentioned in my book whose names—but not necessarily their contributions—are generally unknown. About one third of the people covered in the webinar are women—similar to the percentage of women featured in posts in this blog.

I’m not sure what these statistics say about my research skills. But I am certain of this. As a society, we need to work harder to identify female innovators and to bring attention to their contributions. We must give girls and women more opportunities to rise to their full potential. With the population split almost evenly between male and female, more women should be on the lists of people with first-of-their-kind achievements.