Researcher and writer Asha Gopinathan remembers asking children to name a female scientist when working on science popularisation programmes with the Alliance Francaise in Thiruvananthapuram in March 2015. After several moments of silence, a hand went up and a voice said ‘Marie Curie’. “I realised then that something was wrong. And this wrong needed to be corrected,” she adds. 

She also speaks of another instance from the past, when she asked children to draw scientists. “Thiruvananthapuram is a space town, so of course, space consoles and rockets featured across the drawings. But another thing I noticed was how all the scientists the children drew were men,” she recalls.