Google Doodle celebrates women in STEM on International Women’s day

To celebrate this year’s International Women’s Day, Google is honouring the achievements of visionary women in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) fields with a special doodle.

The artwork, visible on the Google homepage, spotlights “groundbreaking contributions by women who revolutionised space exploration, uncovered ancient discoveries, and pioneered lab research” that has fundamentally shaped the understanding of physics, chemistry and biology.

“This Doodle celebrates International Women’s Day. The United Nations first recognized this holiday in 1975 to highlight how important women’s contributions have been all around the world,” Google said.

While acknowledging the advancements made, Google’s message included the statistic that women still represent only 29 per cent of the global STEM workforce.

“Their work represents the ongoing progress towards gender equality, yet STEM remains one of the areas where significant gaps still persist,” the tech giant added.

Significance of International Women’s Day

In 1975, the United Nations celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8th for the first time. Since then, the UN has become the primary sponsor of the annual event and has encouraged countries around the world to embrace it.

International Women’s Day is observed to recognise the cultural, political, social, and economic achievements made by women. It serves as an opportunity to inspire efforts to end gender biases and discrimination and achieve gender equality.

This year, the theme of International Women’s Day is, ‘Accelerate Action’, which is a worldwide call to acknowledge strategies, resources, and activities that positively impact women’s advancement, and to support and elevate their implementation.

A Google Doodle is a thematic motif that is used by the search engine on its homepage to mark special occasions. Google has also used doodles to celebrate prominent people, their achievements, and more.

The first Google Doodle was published in 1998 as a quick way for Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to let people know they would be out of office for Burning Man. In 2000, Google launched the first international doodle to celebrate Bastille Day in France. The first interactive game Doodle was launched on May 21, 2010, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the popular game, Pac-Man.

Source: NDTV
--Agencies