The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.

This year I have started a new chapter of my life, I am going back to school after being out of the system for more than 15 years.

My career has reached a roadblock due to the fact that I do not have three letters following my name…P…h…D.  The coursework that I am engaged in is rigorous and the classes require that I learn to program using software such as MATLAB; hone my skills in linear algebra, differential equations, and Fourier analysis; as well as read and understand in-depth journal articles surrounding the history of my discipline in optics (starting from the late 1800’s until present day).  I have been pretty engaged in my schoolwork and content that I am keeping up with the workload and the course content, but I wasn’t ready for something that I noticed in one of my current textbooks; figures and references to women.

My Applied Colorimetry professor asked the class to read the first two chapters of his textbook The Principles of Color Technology.  As I started to read chapter one and looked at the first figure of the book, my jaw dropped.  I saw the figure that I have posted here to the right.  The subject in the figure is obviously a woman.  I had never seen a woman in any of my physics textbooks from my undergraduate or Masters level classes before.  It really took me by surprise.

As I continued to read, there were more and more figures that had women represented as the scientist or the observer.  There were also the pronouns “she” or “her” without being in a string of “he/she” or “him/her”.  This was a fascinating concept to me and it made me feel more of a part of the science because my gender was completely included.

The Principles of Color Technology: First Edition came out in 1966 and the original authors were Professor Fred Billmeyer and Adjunct Professor Max Saltzman from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI).  My professor told me that both Billmeyer and Saltzman worked very hard at incorporating women into all of their figures and their examples so that if you were to count every instance in the book there would be exactly 50% male representation and 50% female.   They were very proud of this endeavor and definitely way ahead of their time; definitely pro-woman.

This was not a “gender neutral” textbook in the liberal feminist sense because it might still use words such as postman instead of postal worker, or human instead of, well, I have no idea what the replacement would be for that.  That would be a whole lot of work, in my opinion, and I feel an endeavor like that is really not as important.  Including women from the get-go is important and it made me feel a part of the science that I was reading about.

Being able to imagine yourself as the scientist in the picture really goes a long way.  Just because a book replaces all pronouns “he” and “him” with “he/she” and “him/her” doesn’t make a book feel inclusive to women.   Being able to immerse you seamlessly into all parts of the book does.  It requires foresight on the part of the authors and I feel the payoff for both men and women is huge.  Men see women included just as much as women see themselves.  There are a large percentage of women in the area of Color Science and (I believe) we have Billmeyer and Saltzman to thank for that.