7 fiction books featuring women in STEM

With International Women's Day coming up tomorrow, 8 March, it becomes increasingly important for us to not only identify and acknowledge, but also actively work towards alleviating the stark gender gap in STEM fields.

When I first got into computer science, I did not see much representation in academic settings or in mainstream media. It was not until I discovered the female tech influencer niche that I realised just how much representation matters in encouraging girls and young women to keep going.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
Gabrielle Zevin
Knopf, 2022

Starting off with one of my favourite books of all time, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow,  at first glance, is a story about friendship and creative collaboration. But at its core, it's a story about love—love in all forms. Spanning from the 80s to the early 2000s, the novel follows two childhood friends, Sam and Sadie, who, once bonded by their love of playing video games and then estranged by the passage of time, have a chance encounter in a train platform in Cambridge, Massachusetts while attending university. The fateful day leads to a partnership in game design which ultimately thrusts them into stardom and the business of technology.

With tomorrow being International Women's Day, 8 March, it becomes increasingly important for us to not only identify and acknowledge, but also actively work towards alleviating the stark gender gap in STEM fields and the lack of representation of women in STEM.

Through Sadie's character, Gabrielle Zevin subtly but masterfully captures how women tech founders, especially in the video game industry, receive little recognition for their efforts and are questioned about their technical credibility.

The Only Woman in the Room
Marie Benedict
Sourcebooks Landmark, 2019

Most people know Hedy Lamarr as the beautiful, glamorous actress of Golden Age Hollywood, but very few know she was also a brilliant scientist and inventor who laid the foundations for today's WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS technologies. The book is a historical fiction chronicling Hedy's rise in Hollywood, her marriage to an Austrian arms dealer, and the period of World War II where she helped develop a communication technology with a fellow male scientist to fight the Nazis.

In real life, Hedy Lamarr was overshadowed and her contributions were not recognised until much later. The book tackles some of these themes and touches upon the sexism shown towards her intellect. If you love reading about inspirational women, check out Marie Benedict's other books, all paying homage to some of the brilliant STEM minds of history.

The Startup Wife
Tahmima Anam
Scribner, 2021

One from Bangladesh, Tahmina Anam's The Startup Wife is a witty, satirical take on modern relationships and tech culture. It follows Asha, a computer scientist at MIT, and her whirlwind marriage to her high school crush, Cyrus. Together, with Asha's algorithms and Cyrus's ideas, they develop a social media app that becomes the buzzy new startup. The skyrocketing fame puts their marriage to the test and pushes the already marginalised Asha to the sidelines.

The novel not only deals with the issues of being a woman in a male-dominated field where taking ownership of your work is a constant battle, but also explores what it means to be a woman of colour—another important layer to the gender gap in tech in Western countries.

Ripe
Sarah Rose Etter
Scribner, 2023

We glamorise a position in the corporate world so much that we often forget that the dream job can lead to burnout once you start living it. The novel follows one such woman, Cassie, who, despite having a coveted tech job at a startup in the heart of Silicon Valley, is miserable. Throughout the novel, Cassie is followed by a black hole, always growing and shrinking but never leaving her, but tries her best to keep up with the soul-crushing, hyper-capitalist, cutthroat work culture of San Francisco. When her job starts demanding more of her than she can take, physically and ethically, and past trauma starts to resurface, she grapples with the idea of whether it is all worth it or not.

Ripe is a tale of late-stage capitalism and glittering cities, where poverty and misery lurk in the shadows of the night—a modern day dystopia. Through first-person narration, the author manages to portray the bleakness in a way that makes the dread seeps into your soul. If you are suffering from depression or severe existential dread, you might want to save this book for happier times.

The Unseen World
Liz Moore
W. W. Norton & Company, 2016

Mystery AND tech? Sign me up! The Unseen World tells the story of Ada Sibelius, who, as a child used to accompany her father, David, a researcher of Artificial Intelligence, to his computer science lab every day during the 1980s. Growing up in the academic environment—which the author depicts accurately—she has absorbed as much science and mathematics knowledge as possible and regularly contributed to David's project. When David succumbs to Alzheimer's disease, Ada is not only left with an ailing father but also a disk that chronicles his life's work. Spending years decrypting the disk, she begins to uncover that her father is not who she thinks he is and his project is not what she has come to know.

The protagonist in this spectacular coming-of-age novel is named after Ada Lovelace, the world's first computer programmer. Although famous in her own right, when I found out she was also Lord Byron's daughter, my interest in combining computers and literature grew trifold.

The Rose Code 
Kate Quinn
William Morrow, 2021

Another historical fiction from the WWII era and set in Britain, The Rose Code is about three women, all hailing from very different parts of society, who come together in a mysterious intelligence unit called Bletchley Park to break German military codes to fight the Nazis. Initially bound by the secrecy of their work, the brilliant codebreakers' friendship is torn apart by a betrayal that separates them for many years after the war, until knowledge emerges about a spy that traded their secrets. Brought together again, for the love of their country and the sake of their friendship, the women must crack a final code to find out who had infiltrated Bletchley Park. 

The Soulmate Equation
Christina Lauren
Gallery Books, 2022

The list would not be complete without something for fans of light-hearted romance fiction. Jess is a data analyst and a single mother. She lives and breathes numbers and statistics, so when a dating website claiming to make matches based on DNA pops up, she's determined to finally find her soulmate. The catch? She is matched with the obnoxious founder of the company himself—a 98% match. When the company offers her compensation to try the match, she is forced to fake date the man. But can Jess rely on the numbers and science to find her soulmate?

Mashiyat Nayeem is a woman in STEM moonlighting as a starving artist. Reach her at mashiyat.nayeem@gmail.com.