In this behind the scenes clip, actress Gillian Jacobs talks about how she first learned about Hedy Lamarr, and how important it is to recognize the contributions of the many trailblazing women in STEM, because so many of them have been erased and dismissed.
The first thing I heard was about the invention I didn't really know I knew her name but I didn't know much about her career as an actress and so then I think I probably went to Wikipedia and I heard about the book headies folly and I bought a copy of Ecstasy on eBay and so you know there are so many conflicting stories about her life what's true what's not I would tell people she dressed up as her maid and escaped and then I read something else like that never happened I'd be like oh I feel so foolish for having said that and then somebody else will say no I think that did a version of that did happen and so the the facts of her life seemed to be so implausibly dramatic but they just might have been her life was much better than probably any of the movies she ever appeared in I think that it's really important to restore not just hey Lamar but all of these women to the history of technology to the history of STEM because so many of them have been erased whether it was the women of the ENIAC project at the University of Pennsylvania who are some of the very first computer coders and programmers in the world who really helped invent the idea of what a computer coder is or even Grace Hopper who is relatively well known but not known by the general public and she is the driving force behind the compiler and this whole new philosophy in computer programming languages I think so many of these women were dismissed whether it was overt or it was an implicit or explicit bias you know a lot of them have been removed from the history and so many of them contributed you know specifically to World War II.
