Editorial special issue women in glass

Abstract

While the world is progressing toward gender equality and women's empowerment under the Millennium Development Goals, discrimination continues to exist in the scientific world. This discrimination takes many faces, but continues—in many arenas—to propagate the historic mistreatment of women. Rosalind Franklin obtained the first X-ray image of DNA but Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize. Jocelyn Bell discovered pulsars but her PhD advisor was awarded the Nobel Prize. And while Marie Curie twice won the Nobel Prize, only 3% of these prizes in medicine, physics, or chemistry have been awarded to women, as evi-denced most recently with the 2019 Physics awardee, Donna Strickland, being the first woman in almost 100 years. Hence, there is no doubt that underrepresentation, discrimination, and lack of recognition of female scientists and engineers continues to be present.