In other words, technical areas such as engineering will masculinise womanhood and erode the femininity which is designed to bolster patriarchal aesthetics.

Today, in 2007, the educational and social systems of most countries of the world have made dramatic shifts from this anti-female/pro-male mindset in the field of science and technology to one in which girls are excelling in a broad range of scientific endeavours, and many women have broken the frontiers of leadership and management in technological research and scientific inventions.

Besides demonstrating that a girl can be whatever she wants to be, these pioneering women continue to be bold enough to describe the lingering patriarchal culture that determine the realities of their lives in spite of their achievements.

Women earn less

This situation was encapsulated in the Summer 2007 edition of the International Women's Newsletter. In this document, it was pointed out that even though there is a significant increase in the number of science and engineering degrees awarded to women since 1966, such women continue to earn less than men. Also, these women, globally, feel discriminated against when it comes to advancement in their fields, and like all other women who are pursuing careers outside of the home, they are challenged to find a workable balance between home life and work in the public domain.

Of course, while these positive developments and their accompanying restraints are obvious in First World and developed nations, there are still many more difficult systemic barriers that are keeping women and girls out of the scientific fields in developing societies.

It is in these societies that much more effort should be placed on issues such as:

In the past the emphasis was necessarily on ensuring access to girls in the scientific areas, public education to resocialise families into recognising that girls and boys should participate in all subject areas in schools, and engaging the women who broke the frontiers of resistance to become trailblazers in scientific and technological endeavours.

At this juncture, much is expected of the women who are in the scientific fields in all countries of the world. Women, by virtue of their history, must be bold and committed to the needed social, political and economic changes that will ensure the sustenance and expansion of the gains that gendered equality promises.

Areas to consider

To put this more concretely, in the context of Latin America and the Caribbean, for instance, all scientists (male and female) should consider the following areas:

1. Ensuring that reproductive technologies, such as invitro fertilisation, which can have potentially greater negative impact on women's bodies than on men, are well monitored and improved in the region. The scientific community need to always be mindful of this, especially in a world where young women are pursuing their career dreams [goals] and delaying their reproductive capabilities. These women need to make such decisions in an environment well informed by the most sensitive and woman friendly approaches.

2. In the area of agriculture, there is a current debate around the connection between the use of pesticides in the banana industry and the rise in the incidence of cancer and infertility in the women of Martinique and Guadeloupe. Scientists of the region need to ensure that their scientific innovations do not create greater health-related problems for women and their families.

3. Two areas of great concern to the region are the feminisation of the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the continued high levels of violence against women and girls. While we have seen some real successes in medical knowledge in stemming the mother-to-child transmission of HIV, very little research has been done on scientific methods to modify or control the predisposition of men to act in very violent ways towards women and girls in society.

The challenge for innovators in the technological field is to ensure that the positive contributions to the quality of life by the Internet and other forms of communication technology are not cancelled out by their role in perpetuating violence through pornography, chat rooms and the promotion of the lifestyles of paedophiles and other perverted humanity. Indeed, this great technological invention is contributing to the levels of violence against women in all societies, but more particularly, it is influencing adversely the life chances of some of the women and girls in the most underdeveloped regions.

In short, women and men who are breaking the frontiers in science and technology must be always conscious of their social responsibility to humanity in general and to the most marginalised, victimised and poorest in the global family - these are overwhelmingly the women and girls of our world.