The Media Lab presented its Disobedience Award to several leading figures behind the #MeToo movement, including two scientists who have helped to raise awareness about sexual harassment in the field of science, reports Meredith Wadman for Science.
Writing for the Financial Times, Maura Herson, assistant dean of the Sloan MBA Program, underscores the benefits of providing mentorship for women. “One of the greatest things women can do to support each other is to become mentors and bring up the women behind them,” Herson writes.
Writing for the American History Magazine, Sarah Richardson highlights the trailblazing path of Ellen Swallow Richards. Richardson notes that Swallow Richards was a “one-woman parade of firsts: first female student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first female fellow of the American Association of Mining and Metallurgy, first female professor at MIT.”
Prof. Marcia Bartusiak speaks with Radio Boston’s Evan Horowitz about her book, “Dispatches from Planet 3.” Bartusiak explains that she was inspired to “take a new exciting finding and provide the backstory. All of these essays are taking something new - a new idea, a new discovery - and showing that it had an origin or a seed in the past.”
Zofia Niemtus writes for The Guardian about tech startups focused on helping breastfeeding mothers. Niemtus notes that MIT’s second “Make The Breast Pump Not Suck!” hackathon, which focused on marginalized groups in society, resulted in projects like “a pop-up shelf for pumping in unsanitary public places; a lactation kit for use in disaster zones; and a virtual reality app.”
The BBC’s Jane Wakefield attends a breast pump hackathon at MIT, where she meets with “a group of women determined to improve this old-fashioned tech.” MIT research affiliate Catherine D’Ignazio highlights matters like comfort, discretion and milk tracking capabilities as the type of issues the hackathon looks to solve.
Writing for The Atlantic, MIT lecturer Amy Carleton describes the focus on public policy, as well as engineering and product design, at this year’s “Make the Breast Pump Not Suck” hackathon. “What emerged [at the inaugural hackathon] was an awareness that the challenges surrounding breastfeeding were not just technical and equipment-based,” explains Carleton.
Katie Rae, managing director of The Engine, has collaborated with other Boston-based female investors to create FemaleFounders.org. The group will hold “office hours” that will encourage “entrepreneurs to get to know women investors and build a community,” writes Ron Miller for TechCrunch.
Dr. Joseph Coughlin, director of the AgeLab, speaks with Today Show reporter A. Pawlowski about his new book and why females are uniquely positioned to handle life after middle age. “One of the greatest under-appreciated sources of innovation and new business may in fact be women over 50,” says Coughlin.
Prof. Harvey Lodish and Prof. Emeritus Nancy Hopkins explain in The Boston Globe that the lack of women in the biotech industry stems from the exclusion of women at the venture capital firms that fund those companies. “Including more women in the pool of venture and biotech leaders will insure the success of the Massachusetts biopharmaceutical ecosystem,” Profs. Lodish and Hopkins conclude.
MIT postdoc Ritu Raman is one of five recipients of the 2017 For Women in Science Fellowship from L’Oreal USA, writes Claire Hansen of U.S. News & World Report. The $60,000 grants are awarded to the women “based on the strength of their research and scientific excellence, but also on their commitment to supporting other women and girls in science,” explains Hansen.
Prof. Richard Nielsen writes for The Washington Post that while women in Saudi Arabia have been granted the authority to issue state-sanctioned Islamic legal rulings, this move will probably not improve women’s rights. “It is likely that the fatwas coming from female Salafi muftis will be just as restricting to women as those from their male counterparts,” writes Nielsen.
Prof. Regina Barzilay’s research group is working with MGH to use artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve cancer diagnoses, reports CNBC’s Meg Tirrell. The group also hopes to allow doctors to use “the huge quantities of data available on patients to make more personalized treatment decisions,” explains Tirrell.
A study by Prof. Tanveet Suri shows that a mobile-money service called M-Pesa had a long-term impact on poverty in Kenya, writes Tina Rosenberg for The New York Times. The researchers found that M-Pesa “helped women graduate from subsistence agriculture to small business, perhaps because having an M-Pesa account gives a woman her own money…and a greater sense of agency.”
Melvin Konner writes for The Wall Street Journal about new MIT research that shows mobile-money services helped lift at least 194,000 Kenyan households out of extreme poverty. The researchers found that the services significantly helped women, and estimated that mobile banking “induced 185,000 women to switch into business or retail” from farming, and increased saving.