To all my female scientist friends and colleagues, present and future: Happy International Women’s Day. ATLAS is inviting women to go on shift today in the control room (not that they’re not invited normally, but especially today). Check it out! And Symmetry Breaking did an article on women at the energy frontier!
Whenever there is a celebration of one group, I feel like we’re always stuck defending it from questions like: Why do we celebrate Women’s day? When is men’s day?
I wanted to take a moment to address these questions. Days specific to a cause are designed to increase awareness. Today at CERN, we want to show how many women are involved in particle physics. Most people think of an Albert Einstein-y type of character when they hear scientist: older, white man with crazy hair (if you don’t believe me google image search: scientist). There’s nothing wrong with Albert Einstein (obviously) or men in general, but a girl studying science may find it hard to relate to this type of person. This can dissuade her from joining the field or even worse – she may never even consider entering it.
So we have days like today to say, “Hey, ladies: look at all these successful women scientists! You can be one too!”
I just hope next time there’s cake 
.
Chocolate Cake.... mmmm
-Regina
But how can there be cake if all the women are at the experiment instead of in the kitchen?
But if all of the women were in the kitchen, these experiments would never run! That was the whole point of the celebrations of International Women’s Day at CERN – many of the critical roles at the LHC are held by women.