"Using Visual Means To Challenge Stereotypes"

I saw a pointer in the December 2006 issue of Physics Today to a PDK poster project about female scientists. There are a series of posters -- some good, some tacky -- meant for a very good purpose, but the implementation is problematic. For one thing, they are rather expensive and the means for people like to teachers to acquire them for discounted prices seem to be down for the moment (which could unfortunately go a long way towards defeating the whole purpose). For another, the website is far less useful than it could be because the biographies of profiled people (which is presumably of direct interest and one of the main points of the whole endeavor) are not right next to the posters about their research. Anyway, the idea is excellent, but the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. This comes across as a commercial project (not to be cynical, but maybe that was the real intent of this whole thing?) rather than one whose purpose is to benefit society. I think there will be some benefit, but it seems to me that the retarded implementation is really going to kill it---which is a crying shame, because the idea is extremely good. You know, put these posters up in the hallways of high schools and in math, physics, and other departments to show current students what they have the chance to achieve if they work. However, from a practical point of view, I can't see this happening (especially at the high school level) with people already having to fight unmercifully to change their budgets. Because of the website, I could only occasionally figure out who was being profiled with a given poster, and in the case of the mathematicians, I've already heard of many of these people. (For many of them, one also sees just what is being studied and nothing about who did the studying!) In at least one case and presumably two (I assume the wavelet one is about Ingrid Daubechies because there's nobody else about whom it could be, but I couldn't read the small font in the thumbnail), I even know the person being profiled and I couldn't immediately tell without delving deeper into the web page, which most people are simply not going to have the patience to do (again, contributing to defeat the purpose). I did once send one of my students to talk to her (she was on the GT math faculty when I was there) because I felt it was necessary for my student to talk to a female faculty member because there are experiences that I felt needed to be discussed that there's no way I can understand first-hand.

In sum: Awesome idea but asinine implementation. This project could have had a major impact and it probably won't even be a blip on the radar screen as a result. Why aren't the professional science societies taking this where it should go? Some of the people who were profiled have high-ranking positions in those societies.