Will the real women in science please stand up

On the second Tuesday of October, a small subset of humanity celebrates Ada Lovelace Day in honour of the 19th Century computing pioneer. There are film screenings and museum visits, and bloggers are encouraged to write about women’s achievements in STEM. Most distinctive of the events is a Wikipedia Editathon to set the record straight and add as many fully fleshed-out entries about female scientists, engineers and mathematicians as can be done in the span of an afternoon. Given that more than 80% of Wikipedia’s biographical articles are about men (and this reflects the wider ratio of coverage and recognition), the editathons are an act of resistance. Which may be why xAI’s Grok has been getting into the same spirit. Not generally known for woke activism, the Large Language Model recently composed an article for its competing site Grokipedia that nevertheless helped redress the balance. The entry chronicles the wartime work of a member of the Manhattan Project’s Montreal Lab and the…