During my trip to Warsaw for the European project AI2Schools, I visited the house-museum dedicated to the life and work of Marie Skłodowska Curie. I discovered things I didn’t know, and I saw others I already knew in a new light. They seemed more relevant than ever.
Her parents valued education, but they believed that you also learn a lot from hands-on experience, not only from books. Marie waited for years for a Polish love, but his family opposed the relationship because her family was poor, due to her father’s patriotic ideas and his opposition to Russian rule… What would have happened to her if she had married that man? Would she have become a housewife, since women in Poland were not allowed to go to university?
Marie worked as a governess so that her older sister could finish her studies in Paris, while waiting for the chance to join her. Paris was the city that allowed her to truly express herself: to continue the studies she had started in secret, to become the first woman to teach at the University of Paris, and to win two Nobel Prizes in two different sciences, chemistry and physics. Yet she never wanted to patent her discoveries, so that they would be available to everyone, even to those who couldn’t afford them.
We often talk about the importance of role models for empowering girls, and Marie Curie is without doubt an important and, in some ways, unique figure. But I think we should also highlight another figure: her husband, Pierre Curie. Unlike many men in the history of science who took credit for women’s discoveries or left them in the shadows, Pierre chose to recognise and value Marie’s role. He insisted that the Nobel Prize should also recognise his wife’s contribution, making her the first woman to receive it, and he chose to wait until she could be there to collect it, since at that time she couldn’t travel because she was pregnant with their second daughter.
Women’s empowerment isn’t built only on strong female role models, but also on men who choose to recognise merit, share space, and not take for themselves what belongs to both.
For me, this could be the start of a project on male role models. A way to help boys distance themselves from the toxic masculinity of those who want women in very long skirts, or even in no skirts at all, as long as they are devoted to the home. And to guide them towards a vision that recognises talent and defends women’s professionalism and their right to choose their own place in the world, helping them carry the effort this requires. So that they become men who recognise merit, even when it would be easier to take all the credit, and who offer their contribution and support to the women beside them.
