For too many women interested in pursuing careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM), it’s still a man’s world. Not only that: it’s also a man’s moon.
Bettina Forget is a Public Scholar and PhD candidate in art education in Concordia’s Faculty of Fine Arts. She is studying ways in which the arts and sciences can merge to encourage women to enter STEM fields. This includes astronomy, another discipline heavily dominated by men and whose early pioneers had the privilege of naming discoveries after themselves. As a result, says Forget, far more astronomical bodies bear the names of men than women.
This includes the craters on Earth’s moon: 1,578 of them have been named and catalogued, but only 32 — just 2 per cent — are named for women. And half of those are on the moon’s far side.
It was this discrepancy that inspired Forget to begin two related art projects: Women With Impact and One Small Step, about which she recently published an article in the journal Leonardo. Women With Impact is a series she began in 2016 of hand-drawn illustrations of the 32 craters named after women. Until recently it was on display at Montreal’s Planetarium. The drawings began with Forget sitting by her telescope and peering at individual craters and was completed using high-resolution photos of the lunar landscape taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.
“This is where science and aesthetics overlap,” she says. “The orbiter takes several passes while photographing these craters, so the shadowing is different each time. It allowed me to bring in some interpretation and to highlight what is characteristic of each crater. When you look at the finished product, it’s almost like a family portrait.”