Leavitt, whose chief discovery allowed astronomers to measure the distance between Earth and other galaxies, is the focus of Lauren Gunderson's new play, "Silent Sky," which opened last week at TheatreWorks. "The women of today stand on the shoulders of those who have come before," said Jenny Dearborn, chief learning officer at Success Factors, an SAP company, who as a board member of TheatreWorks was so inspired by Leavitt's story that she has put together a networking fundraiser with top-flight Silicon Valley science and tech executives that includes lunch and a private performance of the play. The $150-per-person "Leading Ladies" event on Feb. 8 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts features Natalie Batalha, science team leader for NASA's Kepler mission; Ann Bowers, the first female director of personnel for Intel Corp.; and Randi Zuckerberg, founder of Zuckerberg Media and author of "Dot Complicated." At the Harvard College Observatory, she and other highly educated women were relegated to busywork, viewing photographic plates and cataloging the brightness of stars for 25 cents an hour, and were dubbed "Pickering's harem," after the director Edward Pickering, according to the nonprofit American Association of Variable Star Observers website. Women have come a long way since Leavitt's day, when they were not allowed to operate telescopes, but Batalha said women are still "severely underrepresented" in physical sciences, making up only about 20 percent of the faculty in astronomy departments nationwide. Curiosity, said Batalha, whose team in recent years has announced the discoveries of new planets, is innate to the human species. To me that is what science is, yet scientific inquiry has a negative label to many people, men and women alike, maybe because it is perceived as hard or boring. Batalha entered college as a business major, but disliked economics and switched to astronomy after taking engineering math classes and physics.
Reported by SFGate 5 hours ago.
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