Meeting Abstract
She Found Fossils is a picture book about the history and present diversity of women in paleontology. It tells the remarkable stories of women all over the world in paleontological careers. We include professors, curators, artists, preparators, outreach specialists, and students. The story behind the creation and successful fundraising is just as interesting as the stories within book itself. We had no difficulty coming up with ideas for kid’s books, but meetings with publishers sent us in radically different directions and ended with numerous rejections. Finally, we decided that it was time to take our idea into our own hands, connect with an illustrator independently, and raise the money for publication through crowdfunding. The book is now scheduled for release in December, and will be available in three languages: English, Spanish, and Mandarin. We will also donate copies of the book to schools, libraries, and museums in underserved communities. A major challenge for diversity-fostering material is that the way it gets presented and marketed tends to implicitly narrow its potential target audience and diminish its impact and longevity, which has also been shown to discourage women. We address this by discussing the barriers some of our historical figures faced in simple and direct language, and contrasting these to the present day. Explicit gender-based barriers to education persist in many parts of the world, and we were fortunate to be able to include the stories of some modern, groundbreaking women who have dealt with this exclusion. We hope, by presenting a concrete concept of what marginalization looks like, as well as how some individuals have battled it, to help recast modern STEM fields as more inclusive and diverse than ever.
