4 Women Who Changed the World
Introduction
Struggling to acquire equal opportunities in society to practice equal rights, women have begun long ago to mark their ways in scientific and technological lines with their remarkable progress.
In the past centuries, a woman’s strength was often linked to how much domestic workload she could stand up to. Despite having exceptional intellectual abilities and determination, women had to work according to gender-based roles.
But these robust women, despite their environmental conducts, astonished the world with their visions and inventions. In this article, we will stick together to discuss comprehensively these women who made the world better with their innovations and broad mindsets.
Arfa Karim
Arfa Abdul Karim Randhawa was a Pakistani, born on July 2nd, 1995, into Punjab Jatt Family from Ram Diwali in Faisalabad district, Punjab, Pakistan. We know her as the World’s First Youngest Microsoft Professional. Arfa’s remarkable skills of playing with computers led her to hold the title of Youngest IT professional in the world.
Early and Late Life
Arfa Karim was the daughter of Abdul Karim and Samina Karim. Arfa was the eldest daughter of her parents, but they never spared a second in giving her good upbringings.
Arfa’s mother stated in one of her interviews, “We sensed her extraordinary intellectuality, and therefore gave her the freedom to play with computers. She further added,
“Parents should understand the abilities of their children. Many parents don’t focus on what their children are up to, and that’s how they end up bounding them.”
Being an eight-year-old kid, Arfa took computer classes at the nearby computer point where one of her instructors sensed her unusual talent.
She was studying 2nd year A-level from Lahore Grammar High School before her death.
Career
Doing something remarkable in IT doesn’t tackle everyone’s fancy. Even people who spend their lives using computers can’t wholly understand every function of a computer.
But Arfa, at nine, became the youngest IT professional. Because Arfa cleared the international Microsoft test with conspicuous effectiveness, she put not only the world in wonder but also astounded Bill Gates later invited her for one week’s visit to Microsoft Headquarters in the USA.
During her visit, she overtook different computer labs and gadgets advanced in that period. As Arfa profoundly amazed Bill Gates by her intelligence, he was elated to conduct a ten-minute meeting with Arfa.
During their meeting, Bill Gates asked her different questions. Arfa had wonderful dreams in her eyes, and her biggest dream was establishing Digicon Valley. She shared her visions and goals with Bill Gates and asked him to pay her a private visit to her village.
One question he asked her was, “Women in your country don’t have the entitlement of chasing their dreams, then how come you marking such a venture?”
Arfa replied, “Who told you? I’m a girl sitting in front of you from the same country where women practice their entitlements. By the way, why do women are less in the Microsoft headquarters? During my visit, I noticed men are more in number than women.”
At this clear-headedness, he smiled and replied, “Maybe because en are more interested in IT.”
Quotes and Poem
Arfa once said, “I keep myself updated by reading unique books and encyclopedias.”
“If you want to do something in your life, you must remember that shyness is only in the mind. If you think shy, you act shy. If you feel confident, you act confident. Therefore, never let shyness conquer your mind.”
“People say I’m a genius. I might be one, but I'm not the only one. There are many other Pakistani girls and boys like me. All those gems need is a little bit of polishing. And I will do it. That’s my aim.”
I would like to be
Like a bird in the sky
Flying freely and so high
Like a fish in the water
And the king’s beautiful daughterLike a tiny little mouse
Eating cheese around the house
Like a bear in the mountain
And the water in fountainLike a lion in the jungle
Roaring loudly with hunger,
Like a monkey in the zoo
All the time copying you
Digicon Valley: Arfa’s Biggest Goal
Developing her land-Pakistan was her aim; the inauguration of Digicon Valley was a prerequisite. Silicon Valley primarily inspired Arfa’s vision of making; the pivot of technology.
Arfa invariably desired children of her age, youngsters, and elders to polish their tech skills under a roof where they would have experienced instructors to cut a suitable path according to their capacity.
These are the bullet points on which she wanted to lay out the foundation of Digicon Valley were:
1. Educational Training as per international standards that would enhance their perspectives and prepare them to withstand the world.
2. Students studying under this system would use their abilities to make their economy strong.
3. Arfa’s effort would expand the vitality in youth that would lead to national evolution.
4. Students related to technology would not have to go abroad for their advanced education and professional enhancement. They would earn a good amount within the limits of their country.
5. Arfa firmly believed that a country’s all-inclusive progress depends on its technological advancement; she was inclined to introduce Digicon Valley as the pre-eminent technological advancement tool.
6. Deprivation of technological growth is the vital factor of the backwardness of a country. Arfa was tendentious to emerge from a medium where people could handle herculean tasks professionally.
7. Arfa had the desire to make IT labs in urban, particularly in rural areas, providing equal entitlement to unprivileged students.
8. Digicon Valley would train staff in the remote areas to meet the requirements of naturally adept students. They would impart impartial knowledge to their pupils.
9. Making digitalized curriculum would be easy to access in contrast to a traditional curriculum because it would be easy to focus on electronic learning for the masses at primary and secondary levels in pastoral zones.
10. Arfa wanted to establish a full-fledged Development Center enhancing technology for the public; this center would be the model of Human Resource Development Center (HRDC), containing classrooms, multipurpose halls, IT labs, and residential flats for faculty members, and it would open activity areas. The HRDC would act as a hub for developing individual skills through formal and vocational IT training.
11. Digicon valley would also focus on individuals who want to carry out technological practices. Digicon valley would provide these intellectual students with complete and proper road maps for fulfilling their dreams.
12. They would connect it to the internet. Also, e-governess projects would help to address problems, solutions ore effectively.
Awards and Honors
After capturing a glorious reputation from the international world, Arfa captured many national and international awards for her competence.
I compiled the following list with Arfa’s awards and medals.
1. The youngest holder of the President’s Pride of Performance award: Tamgha-e-Husan-e-Karkardagi. It is a high-level civil award deal out at the investiture ceremony on March 23rd.
2. Fatima Jinnah Gold Medal in Science and Technology by the Prime Minister of the time.
3. Salam Pakistan Youth Award (2005).
4. Arfa received the first flight certificate at 10 in the flying club of Dubai.
5. In November 2006, Microsoft invited Arfa Karim to be a part of the keynote session at the Tech-Ed Developers conference held in Barcelona.
6. She was the only Pakistani among over 5000 developers at the conference.
7. Mr. Khalil-ur-Rahman Foundation awarded Arfa with the Shabash Award.
Death
On 14th January 2012, Arfa Karim departed from this world, leaving her dreams and goals for us. The cause of her death was cardiac arrest. Before this attack, Arfa was encountering epileptic seizures.
Arfa’s health had been satisfactory before these attacks, but her sudden death shocked the world and especially the inhabitants of her motherland who lost a gem so early. Now, Arfa is resting in Place Chak No 4JB, Ram Diwali, Punjab, Pakistan.
Grace Hopper
Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was an American born in December 1906 in New York City. The world remembers her as a computer scientist: the inventor of the world’s first linkers (Compiler). In the era in which technological enhancement was least expected from a woman, Grace Brewster shocked the world with her invention and services.
Early and Late Life
Grace Brewster was born to Walter Fletcher Murray and Mary Campbell Van Horne. As a child, Grace was curious to learn various things. At seven, her curiosity arose to determine how an alarm clock worked, and therefore Grace dismantled over seven alarm clocks without getting noticed.
Hopper started her schooling career at Hartridge School in Plainfield, New Jersey. Because of having low marks in Latin, they rejected her for getting enrollment at Vassar College at 16. However, the following year, the college accepted her as a student.
She graduated from Beta Kappa from Vassar in 1928 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and physics and earned her master’s degree at Yale University in 1930.
In 1934, Hopper earned a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from Yale under the supervision of Oystein Ore. He was a Norwegian Mathematician. Hopper began her teaching career in mathematics at Vassar in 1931. After that, she was promoted to associate professor in 1941.
Hopper got married to New York University’s professor Vincent Foster Hopper in 1930. The couple separated their ways in 1945, after which she did not marry again, but kept his surname.
Career
Grace Brewster began her computing career in 1944, and she was the first programmer of Harvard Mark. Grace was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages. She also created the Flow Matric programming language using her research theory that she later extended to create COBAL; it was early high-level programming that still serves.
In case the reader doesn’t know what linkers are, a linker or link editor is a computer system program that takes one or more object files by a compiler or assembler to combine them into a single viable file, library- file, or another object file.
Grace recommended introducing the English language to computers to make it easy to write statements. Despite the opposition Hopper received, she cleared out of data processors, capable of writing their programs in the English language, and the computers would translate them into machine codes.
Her linkers converted English terms into machine code understandable by computers. Grace had finished her program linkers by 1952, which was written for the 0 system.
During wartime, she gave services of co-authoring three papers based on her work on the Harvard Mark.
Grace Brewster was awarded several awards and medals for her services in World War 2.
In 1949, Hopper became an employee to the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation as a senior mathematician and joined the tea to develop UNIVAC. It was the first known large-scale electronic computer in 1950. This electronic computer was more competitive at processing than the Mark.
Awards and Honors
1. IEEE Emanuel R. Piore award, 1988.
2. National Medal of technology and invention, 1991.
3. Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2016.
Death
At 85, on 1st July 1992 in New York, Grace died a natural death at her home in Arlington, Virginia. She was awarded 40 honorary degrees from universities all over the world.
Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson
Shirley Jackson was born on 5th August 1946 in Washington. She is the first African-American woman who has earned a doctorate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the second African-American woman in the United States, to earn a doctorate in physics.
Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson is also an American Theoretical physicist whose research from the 1970s is accountable for Caller-ID and calls waiting.
Early Life
Jackson was born to Beatrice and George Jackson. Her parents were determined to focus on her education, and her father, Beatrice, would help her with her scientific projects for her science classes.
She completed her school life at Roosevelt Senior High School with detailed and progressive programs of Mathematics and Science and then graduated in 1964 as valedictorian.
Her classes began at MIT in 1964, being the only student studying theoretical physics out of the twenty African-American students.
During her studies, she took part in volunteer work at Boston City Hospital. In 1968, Jackson earned her BS degree with her thesis written on solid-state physics.
Career
Jackson studied and conducted a vast deal of physics laboratories in the United States and Europe. Jackson was a postdoctoral researcher of subatomic particles during the 1970s.
At the initial stage, she was a research associate at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois; We also know it as (Fermilab). In 1974, she became the visiting scientist at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland, where she traverses theories of strongly interacting particles.
From 1991 to 1995, Jackson served as a faculty at Rutgers University in Piscataway and New Brunswick, New Jersey. During this time, she focused on the electronic and optical properties of two-dimensional and quasi-two-dimensional systems.
Jackson handed out the knowledge of charged density waves in layers compound, polaronic aspects of electrons in the surface of liquid helium films, and optical and electronic properties of semiconductor strained-layer superlattices. She has disseminated above a hundred scientific articles during her time at AT&T Bell Laboratories.
According to some resources, Jackson led scientific research while working at Bell Laboratories that permitted others to fabricate the portable fax: a pen-based input device, touch-tone telephone: a telephone comprised push buttons that produce tones in corresponding to numbers, solar cells: a device that metamorphoses solar radiation into electricity), fiber optical cables (a kind of electrical cable that has one or over one optic fiber to carry out light) and technology behind Caller ID and call waiting.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton nominated Jackson to serve as chairperson of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It made her the first woman and the first African-American woman to hold that position.
On 1st July in 1999, she became the 18th president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Since her appointment to president RPI, she has helped generate over $1 billion for donations for philanthropic causes.
Jackson is one of the highest-paid university presidents in the nation after arriving at RPI.
Awards and Honors
Jackson has been bestowed with many fellowships, honors, and awards.
1. The Martin Marietta Aircraft Company Scholarship and Fellowship.
2. The Prince Hall Masons Scholarship.
3. The National Science Foundation Traineeship, and a Ford Foundation Advanced Study Fellowship.
4. She has been elected to many certain societies, including the American Philosophical Society.
5. In 2014, Jackson was named a recipient of the National Medal of Science.
6. Thomas Alva Edison Science Award in the early 1990s by New Jersey Governor James Florio.
7. Jackson received the Richtmyer Memorial Award in 2001.
8. For years 1976 to 1981, she received awards as one of the Outstanding Young Women of America.
9. In 1985, New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean nominated her to the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology.
10. Jackson is an active voice in many committees of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the National Science Foundation.
11. In 2004, she became president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and chaired the AAAS board in 2005.
12. In spring 2007, she was awarded the Vannevar Bush Award for “A lifetime of achievements in scientific research, education and senior state leader-like contributions to public policy.”
13. In 2007, she received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement presented by Awards Council member Dr. Ben Carson.
14. In 2008, Jackson became the University Vice-chairperson of the US Council on Competitiveness, a non-for-profit group based in Washington, DC.
15. In 2009, President Barack Obama appointed Jackson to serve on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, a 20-member advisory group dedicated to public policy.
16. They appointed her an International Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2012.
17. In 1982, she received a Candace Award for Technology from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women.
Josephine Cochrane
Josephine Garis Cochrane was born on the 8th of March, 1839, in Ashtabula County and was raised in Valparaiso, Indiana. Cochrane’s natural tendency toward technology secured her the title of the world’s first dishwashing machine inventor.
Early and Late Life
Josephine Cochrane was the daughter of John Garris Irene Fitch; her father was an engineer from Chicago. Cochrane’s father had invented a hydraulic pump for draining marshes.
Josephine Cochrane’s received her early education from a school in Indiana that fortuitously got burnt. After that incident, her father sent her to Shelbyville, Illinois, where she continued her studies, living with her sister. Cochrane completed her high school and graduated in Shelbyville, Illinois.
Career
When came across any problem, Cochrane used technology to knuckle it down, either by utilizing already existing solutions or by inventing one. Cochrane contrived a successful automatic dishwasher when she found the washing-dishing task tiresome. After perceiving how her fine china often chipped off while scrubbing into the sink, she created a mechanized dishwasher that got off the ground.
Right after she began working on her design in 1883, her alcoholic husband fell peaky and died, leaving her behind with just a thousand and five hundred dollars and a mountain of debt. Now, her invention became a financial necessity.
Although many people tried their luck in inventing similar devices-a hand-cranked model was patented in 1850, none of them ever made their efforts to commercial usage. Cochrane once said in front of her first employee, “If nobody else is going to invent the dishwashing machine, I will do it myself.”
To create her dishwashing machine, she took the initial step of measuring the dishes and then constructed wire compartments to fit plates, cups, and saucers. Cochrane placed these dishes inside a wheel that would lie flat within a copper boiler.
After the wheel turned, powered by a motor, soapy water would spurt over the dishes to clean them. Cochrane designed her dishwashing machine eccentric to the other dishwashing machines that had used scrubbers. Her dishwashing machine had holders particularly attached to hold the dishes in their place.
After Cochrane had successfully laid out her machine, she was confronted with finding customers who could buy her device; this difficulty was also the outcome of making gender roles. As per Cochrane, “With buying something for the kitchen that costs $75 or $100, a woman begins at once to figure out all the other things she could do with the money.
She hates dishwashing — what woman does not? — but she has not learned to think of her time and comfort as worth money. Besides, she is not the deciding factor with spending comparatively enormous sums of money on the house.”
Cochrane later found a manufacturing company, “Garris-Cochrane” to manufacture her machines. After showing her invention in 1893, she received orders for her dishwashing machine from restaurants and hotels in Illinois.
Josephine Cochrane’s success made contradistinction to her great grandfather John, who failed on his business side-he stirred the waters with his steamboat. Even today, in many ordinary households, her dishwashing machine helps people.
Awards and Honors
1. Josephine Cochrane was issued a patent in December 1886.
2. At the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Cochrane won the highest prize for “best mechanical construction, durability, and adaptation to its line of work”.
3. In 2006 she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
4. In 2013, despite having no connection to the country, Romfilatelia, Romania’s postage issuing agency, released a stamp that bears her face as a part of a three-stamp series of innovative women in history to honor her.
Death
On August 3, 1913, Josephine Cochrane died of a stroke or exhaustion in Chicago, Illinois, aged 74. She was buried in Glenwood Cemetery in Shelbyville, Illinois.
Conclusion
Even in 2021, many societies make roles along gender lines and disregard the capabilities a woman holds within herself. More often than not, the social indifference to women’s talent is a reason why so many women are afraid to do anything.
Remember that the scientific and technological evolution isn’t in any gender’s hands; your mind is the trunk box that lays the key to your career’s doors. It strengthens you to open the trunk box, take out the key, unlock the door, and let the world know your hidden talent.
