The development of jobs and women’s participation in the various fields have taken on extreme change throughout the entire lifetime of Kwolek. For example, according to the Department for Professional Employees the “percentage of technical writers who were female increased from 36 percent to 49 percent between 1985 and 2014”. Additionally, this site also mentions a couple other interesting trends in other tech related fields. Another example mentioned is the number of women pharmacists increase from 30 percent to 56 percent in the same time span as previously stated. Finally, on a more related note to our very own Kwolek, “the percentage of female chemists increased from 11 percent in 1985 to 29 percent in 2014” (Department For Professional Employees, 2015).
What is very interesting about one of these trends in particular is the massive jump of percentage participation between 1985 and 2014 in the field of pharmaceuticals. We can possibly attribute this to the quickly growing array of contraception. For example, in just 1980 low hormone does Pills were introduced, followed by contraceptive implants (Norplant), injectable methods, female condoms, Plan B, and more (Thompson, 2013). With the increased say in what happens and what they can do with their own bodies in government, coupled with a growing feminist movement, women have vastly improved their participation in a work force that, at the beginning of Kwolek’s life, used to have very few women, in just a few years.
Another trend that is more directly related to our hero Kwolek, is the massive increase in the fraction of degrees earned by women in chemistry. In a graph provided by the American Physical Society Sites, we can see a steep increase in the fraction of women with a chemistry degree from the year 1965 to 2015 as it raises from about a low .18 to an impressive .48. We also see in the graph that for almost a good 10 years women had over .5 or 50% of the degrees in chemistry from about 2000 to 2010. In addition to the previous statistics concerning the increasing development of pharmaceuticals we can clearly see a correlation as the biggest peaking of the degrees in chemistry, as well as biology, occur as these developments are coming out.
