Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World

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Annie Scott Dill Maunder was a pioneer in astronomical photography, especially of sunspots. A mathematics graduate of Girton College, Cambridge, she was first hired (in 1890) to be an assistant to Edward Walter Maunder, discoverer of the Maunder Minimum, the head of the solar department at Greenwich Observatory. They worked together to observe sunspots and to refine the techniques of solar photography. They married in 1895. Annie's mathematical skills made it possible to analyse the years of sunspot data that Maunder had been collecting at Greenwich. She also designed a small, portable wide-angle camera with a 1.5-inch-diameter (38mm) lens. In 1898, the Maunders traveled to India, where Annie took the first photographs of the sun's corona during a solar eclipse. By analysing the Cambridge records for both sunspots and geomagnetic storm, they were able to show that specific regions of the sun's surface were the source of geomagnetic storms and that the sun did not radiate its energy uniformly into space, as William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin had declared. [81] Emmy Noether revolutionized abstract algebra, filled in gaps in relativity, and was responsible for a critical theorem about conserved quantities in physics. One notes that the Erlangen program attempted to identify invariants under a group of transformations. On 16 July 1918, before a scientific organization in Göttingen, Felix Klein read a paper written by Emmy Noether, because she was not allowed to present the paper herself. In particular, in what is referred to in physics as Noether's theorem, this paper identified the conditions under which the Poincaré group of transformations (now called a gauge group) for general relativity defines conservation laws. [92] Noether's papers made the requirements for the conservation laws precise. Among mathematicians, Noether is best known for her fundamental contributions to abstract algebra, where the adjective noetherian is nowadays commonly used on many sorts of objects.

In the later nineteenth century the rise of the women's college provided jobs for women scientists, and opportunities for education. A founder of modern botany and zoology, the German Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), spent her life investigating nature. When she was thirteen, Sibylla began growing caterpillars and studying their metamorphosis into butterflies. She kept a "Study Book" which recorded her investigations into natural philosophy. In her first publication, The New Book of Flowers, she used imagery to catalog the lives of plants and insects. After her husband died, and her brief stint of living in Siewert, she and her daughter journeyed to Paramaribo for two years to observe insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. [38] She returned to Amsterdam and published The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname, which "revealed to Europeans for the first time the astonishing diversity of the rain forest." [39] [40] She was a botanist and entomologist who was known for her artistic illustrations of plants and insects. Uncommon for that era, she traveled to South America and Surinam, where, assisted by her daughters, she illustrated the plant and animal life of those regions. [41] Wu would later also confirm Albert Einstein's EPR Paradox in the first experimental corroboration, and prove the first violation of Parity and Charge Conjugate Symmetry, thereby laying the conceptual basis for the future Standard model of Particle Physics, and the rapid development of the new field. [108] Evelyn Fox Keller is an evolutionary biologist who got very concerned about the nature of science practice, and realised that there were issues of gender involved. This book has various historical essays about Plato and Bacon, how science turned into a very male field and what it meant, and then some more recent situations. It’s a curious book and I don’t think I’ve entirely got to grips with it. The first time I read it, I was very interested by the early historical stuff but I reacted incredibly badly to the later chapters. I thought she was trying to say there was a female way of doing science. In the US, women with science or engineering doctoral degrees were predominantly employed in the education sector in 2001, with substantially fewer employed in business or industry than men. [139] According to salary figures reported in 1991, women earn anywhere between 83.6 percent to 87.5 percent that of a man's salary. [ needs update] An even greater disparity between men and women is the ongoing trend that women scientists with more experience are not as well-compensated as their male counterparts. The salary of a male engineer continues to experience growth as he gains experience whereas the female engineer sees her salary reach a plateau. [140]Batgrl wrote: "I'd love to like this list, but the problem I have is that some of the selections are great, and some don't seem to belong at all - or at least make it hard to figure out exactly where the women an..." Stephanie Kwolek, a researcher at DuPont, invented poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide – better known as Kevlar. Rosalyn Yalow was the co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally) for development of the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique.

What progress have attitudes towards women in fields like the sciences made since the 20th century?Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman were six of the original programmers for the ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer. [115] Angela Restrepo Moreno is a microbiologist from Colombia. She first gained interest in tiny organisms when she had the opportunity to view them through a microscope that belonged to her grandfather. [128] While Restrepo has a variety of research, her main area of research is fungi and their causes of diseases. [128] Her work led her to develop research on a disease caused by fungi that has only been diagnosed in Latin America but was originally found in Brazil: Paracoccidioidomycosis. [128] Research groups also developed by Restrepo have begun studying two routes: the relationship between humans, fungi, and the environment and also how the cells within the fungi work. [128] The presence of women in science spans the earliest times of the history of science wherein they have made significant contributions. Historians with an interest in gender and science have researched the scientific endeavors and accomplishments of women, the barriers they have faced, and the strategies implemented to have their work peer-reviewed and accepted in major scientific journals and other publications. The historical, critical, and sociological study of these issues has become an academic discipline in its own right. After publicly defending forty nine theses [52] in the Palazzo Pubblico, Laura Bassi was awarded a doctorate of philosophy in 1732 at the University of Bologna. [53] Thus, Bassi became the second woman in the world to earn a philosophy doctorate after Elena Cornaro Piscopia in 1678, 54 years prior. She subsequently defended twelve additional theses at the Archiginnasio, the main building of the University of Bologna which allowed her to petition for a teaching position at the university. [53] In 1732 the university granted Bassi's professorship in philosophy, making her a member of the Academy of the Sciences and the first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university in Europe [53] But the university held the value that women were to lead a private life and from 1746 to 1777 she gave only one formal dissertation per year ranging in topic from the problem of gravity to electricity. [52] Because she could not lecture publicly at the university regularly, she began conducting private lessons and experiments from home in the year of 1749. [52] However, due to her increase in responsibilities and public appearances on behalf of the university, Bassi was able to petition for regular pay increases, which in turn was used to pay for her advanced equipment. Bassi earned the highest salary paid by the University of Bologna of 1,200 lire. [54] In 1776, at the age of 65, she was appointed to the chair in experimental physics by the Bologna Institute of Sciences with her husband as a teaching assistant. [52]

Maria Goeppert Mayer was the second female Nobel Prize winner in Physics, for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. Earlier in her career, she had worked in unofficial or volunteer positions at the university where her husband was a professor. Goeppert Mayer is one of several scientists whose works are commemorated by a U.S. postage stamp. [120] Sally Ride was an astrophysicist and the first American woman, and then-youngest American, to travel to outer space. Ride wrote or co-wrote several books on space aimed at children, with the goal of encouraging them to study science. [123] [124] Ride participated in the Gravity Probe B (GP-B) project, which provided more evidence that the predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity are correct. [125] Italian neurologist Rita Levi-Montalcini received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of Nerve growth factor (NGF). Her work allowed for a further potential understanding of different diseases such as tumors, delayed healing, malformations, and others. [113] This research led to her winning the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine alongside Stanley Cohen in 1986. While making advancements in medicine and science, Rita Levi-Montalcini was also active politically throughout her life. [114] She was appointed a Senator for Life in the Italian Senate in 2001 and is the oldest Nobel laureate ever to have lived. Gertrude B. Elion was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988 for her work on the differences in biochemistry between normal human cells and pathogens. Science remained a largely amateur profession during the early part of the nineteenth century. Botany was considered a popular and fashionable activity, and one particularly suitable to women. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was one of the most accessible areas of science for women in both England and North America. [74] [75] [76]

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A recent book titled Athena Unbound provides a life-course analysis (based on interviews and surveys) of women in science from early childhood interest, through university, graduate school and the academic workplace. The thesis of this book is that "Women face a special series of gender related barriers to entry and success in scientific careers that persist, despite recent advances". [111] Lisa Randall is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, best known for her work on the Randall–Sundrum model. She was the first tenured female physics professor at Princeton University. du Châtelet, a close friend of Voltaire, was the first scientist to appreciate the significance of kinetic energy, as opposed to momentum. She repeated and described the importance of an experiment originally devised by Willem 's Gravesande showing the impact of falling objects is proportional not to their velocity, but to the velocity squared. This understanding is considered to have made a profound contribution to Newtonian mechanics. [66] In 1749 she completed the French translation of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (the Principia), including her derivation of the notion of conservation of energy from its principles of mechanics. Published ten years after her death, her translation and commentary of the Principia contributed to the completion of the scientific revolution in France and to its acceptance in Europe. [67] It’s OK for girls to play with dolls, to be interested in the life sciences, but we convey a very negative image of the physical sciences for them – playing with dolls doesn’t seem to translate into, “let’s take this thing to pieces, let’s understand how it works”. And we have to think about the ways toys are marketed. There was a long article in the Guardian recently about the pinkification of toys. If you look in the [toy retailer] Early Learning Centre I understand the toys are segregated for gender, and toys for girls tend to be pink. Is that good? Bad? What does it do to the way we distinguish at an incredibly early age what boys and girls do?

We ask experts to recommend the five best books in their subject and explain their selection in an interview. Many coeducational colleges and universities also opened or started to admit women during this period; such institutions included just over 3000 women in 1875, by 1900 numbered almost 20,000. [83]How do you encourage more women to go into science, or make that step from undergraduate to postgraduate? Nita Ahuja is a renowned surgeon-scientist known for her work on CIMP in cancer, she is currently the Chief of surgical oncology at Johns Hopkins Hospital. First woman ever to be the Chief of this prestigious department. Are you happy to take up that mantle? It must have its frustrations, for instance interviews like this one which focus on gender rather than science.