The 20th and early 21st centuries have brought innovative – and inventive – leaps forward that our forebears could never have imagined. Technology sits behind almost every aspect of our lives, to the extent that we rarely make a move without consulting an iDevice of some type.
All that’s seen the world become exponentially larger in terms of what we can explore and see, whilst paradoxically shrinking and allowing us (whether we want to or not) to become closer to friends and family across the globe than ever before.
The people who made it happen? Once, they would have been burnt at the stake for using magic. They are the wizards – and I use this word deliberately – of the Age of Aquarius.
Jobs. Zuckerberg. Williams, Glass, Dorsey and Stone – or should that be @evan, @noah, @jack and @biz? Einstein. Tesla. Logie Baird. These are the names that will live in holographic halls of fame as icons of innovative thought for eons. There is one small, but not insignificant issue, in this Hall of Wonders.
Where are the women?
Marissa Mayer may well be the CEO of Yahoo! – but she didn’t create it. Jerry Yang and David Filo did. We all know who founded Facebook and it wasn’t, for all her achievements, Sheryl Sandberg. This is taking nothing away from what these women have done, but they are not the originators of these concepts. We know their names, but they have grown an existing idea, not initiated it.
Yet female innovators and inventors are out there – and have been for a long time (take a bow, Madame Curie). Grace Hopper was not only an admiral in the US Navy but invented the programming language COBOL – in the 1950s. Gertrude Elion won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1988 for her pioneering work in cancer medication. Kevlar was invented by Stephanie Kwolek in 1965, the car windshield wiper by Mary Anderson in 1903.
It has been shown in psychological studies that innovative breakthroughs within corporations are most likely (and successful) when men and women work together [Role Expectations as Constraints to Innovation: Lynne J. Millward & Helen Freeman pages 93-109]. The reasoning that lies behind this? Women are perceived as more adaptive and risk-averse, while men are seen as more innovative and risk-taking. The more adaptive behaviour in women and more risk-taking behaviour in men provides a certain balance or harmony during innovation. Together, they give a complementary effect that seems to yield better results. Great – but why do the roles need to be confined to male/female/risk-taking/risk-averse?
Perhaps over time, this adaptive behaviour has been so encouraged in women when working within teams that it has meant the subduing of their own risk-taking impulses and so-called ‘male’ behaviour?
This needs to be turned on its head.
Why can’t men and women embrace both sides of the equation? Why does ‘risk-taking’ behaviour have to be a male trait, and ‘risk-averse’ behaviour female? Surely it comes down to one trait being that of an innovator, and the other of a supporter.
Not everyone is born to be an inventor – or a leader for that matter. There is a place in the team for every personality archetype. The basic fact remains that this doesn’t have to be gender specific. That list of great innovators and inventors shouldn’t be a list of men; it should be a list of people. Presently though, if you were to include in that list the name ‘Sanger’ or ‘Lamar’, chances are most would draw a blank, unless you included a first name – and even then the latter would be known primarily as an old-school Hollywood actress, not someone who patented a covert communications system used by the US military and a part of how Bluetooth and Wi-Fi work.
Encouraging young girls into the tech-sphere, science, medicine and innovative thinking in general is already a battle because of the low profile women receive.
Let’s aim to increase it – not through imitation, but by invention.
After all, wasn’t necessity the Mother of that word?