19 March 1911, marked the first International Women’s Day where over one million women and men demanded equal rights for women to vote and hold public office without discrimination on the job. During the years of World War I, celebration of this day had been in a form of a protest against the war and the violence. This topic hit a milestone and achieved global awareness when the United Nations, in 1975, officially designated March 8 as International Women’s Day.In many parts of the world, men and women are now considered equal, with the same rights in most social, economic and political spheres. But in the field of science and technology, there are still major gaps and barriers for women especially in the engineering field. According to the National Science Foundation’s survey conducted in 2014, over thirty thousand engineering degrees have been awarded in the USA to men compared to just over four thousand to women. Statistics show more promise for the field of science, where the gap between degrees granted to men and women is only eight thousand.Fortunately, many of these women work in the marine sciences. In the UN Environment/GEF Blue Forests Project, five of the nine project sites are led by women. These women are responsible for exploring the value of coastal blue carbon and related ecosystem services in Ecuador, Madagascar, Mozambique, the UAE and the USA.
The Women of Blue Carbon
