Women are not boring, insist DCU students

TWO DCU PhD students and their website are showing why academic work by women is anything but boring.

Catherine Connolly and Grace McDermott set up the ‘Women Are Boring’ website to feature research and motivate other females to pursue a job in the area of research.

“The big message we want to send to people is that research is really interesting,” said Grace.

“You don’t need to be an expert to read our site so we hope it will encourage more women and girls to consider it as a career.”

The research comes from across all disciplines and topics. Although the topics deal with everything from Brexit and women in ISIS, to Scotland’s health inequalities, Catherine and Grace make sure the articles are approachable so “people can go on and learn”. 

Catherine and Grace are both PhD students in DCU, which is how they met. Sharing classes with other PhD students as part of the programme allowed the pair to be introduced to research areas that they wouldn’t normally experience.

They soon realised that women were doing some interesting research and it wasn’t being seen or heard anywhere.

“There are women living in Dublin who are looking for cures for cancer and helping to stop wars and amazing things but I don’t see anything about them in the news I read,” said Grace.

The name came to Catherine while she was stuck in traffic on a Dublin Bus in Drumcondra.

“We had the idea for the site but not the name and then the phrase ‘Women Are Boring’ popped into my head – I don’t know how,” she said.

“When we googled it we found forums where both men and women discussing women being boring and articles like ‘this is how to not be one of these boring girls’,” the 27-year-old explained.

Such is the success of their site so far, they’ve received over 15,000 views from 94 different countries. They’ve also featured in Stellar, the Irish women’s magazine, and Silicon Republic, a tech and business site. The pair also run Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts in conjunction with their blog – all of which are proving to be very popular.

“We’ve been overwhelmed. We only launched at the start of May and we’ve got a lot of attention straight away. We spotted a gap of very fascinating, very interesting research from women. It’s not just in Ireland but in Canada, the US, Belgium. It’s been really great,” Catherine said. 

Looking to the future, Women Are Boring has some big plans. At the moment funds are limited so the girls are hoping to attract more financing for the site.

“We are looking to build the website, have more audio-visual material and we would be looking at having a weekly or monthly presence somewhere else,” explained Grace.