Microsoft’s New Video Honors Badass, Underappreciated Women Inventors

Nikola Tesla, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein: These are some of the names school-age girls came up with when Microsoft asked them to name inventors for a new video in honor of International Women’s Day.

But when asked to name female inventors, the girls couldn’t come up with a single woman.

It’s a helpful lesson: Even now, kids still have an underappreciation of the impacts of female inventors, and as long as that’s the case, the world will keep producing more men than women that are inventors and entrepreneurs.

The video then shows a number of inventions with the names of women who created them, from Ada Lovelace, who created the first computer algorithm, to Patricia Bath, who pioneered laser cataract surgery.

“It gives me motivation that I can invent something and make maybe a change in the world,” one of the girls says after hearing about all the woman-made inventions. “And that would be really cool.”

Watch the whole video here.