The Men Behind GPS Just Won a Prestigious Engineering Prize. Not on the Prize List: a Woman

It’s an innovation that allows you to pinpoint your earthly location with just the phone in your pocket; it helps drivers navigate tricky routes, and it can even direct rescuers to stricken people in disaster zones. But Dr. Bradford Parkinson wasn’t able to use his brainchild, GPS, to stop himself getting lost in London, he quipped on Tuesday, as he and three others were named winners of the £1 million ($1.29m) Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. The prestigious prize has been awarded every two years since 2013 to engineers responsible for innovations that benefit all of humanity. This year’s chosen technology, which stands for Global Positioning System, joins other far-reaching winners including the Internet and the cellphone camera. James Spilker, Hugo Fruehauf, and Richard Schwartz were also named for their contributions. But the announcement on Tuesday steered the judging panel directly into a controversy, as it became clear that this year’s winners were all male — and that, after four biannual awards, one of the world’s highest-profile and most valuable prizes for engineering has still not been awarded to a woman. Worse still, a female mathematician did help shape the technology that led to GPS. Dr. Anne-Marie Imafidon, the CEO of Stemettes, a company that encourages girls to take up STEM subjects, pointed out the contribution of Dr. Gladys West, who developed algorithms used by satellites to map the shape of the Earth, a bre...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized engineering women Source Type: news