From 2017, ten-pound notes issued by the Royal Bank of Scotland will feature a new face: that of the great nineteenth-century science communicator Mary Somerville. Her book on mathematical astronomy, Mechanism of the Heavens -- published in 1831, when she was fifty years old -- was used as an advanced textbook at Cambridge for a hundred years. This is a phenomenal achievement for a woman who taught herself science and mathematics.
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It is becoming widely accepted that women have, historically, been underrepresented and often completely written out of work in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Explanations for the gender gap in STEM fields range from genetically-determined interests, structural and territorial segregation, discrimination, and historic stereotypes. As well as encouraging steps toward positive change, we would also like to retrospectively honour those women whose past works have been overlooked.
From astronomer Caroline Herschel to the first female winner of the Fields Medal, Maryam Mirzakhani, you can use our interactive timeline to learn more about the women whose works in STEM fields have changed our world.
With free Oxford University Press content, we tell the stories and share the research of both famous and forgotten women.
Featured image credit: Microscope. Public Domain via Pixabay.
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By Jeannette Brown
As far as we know, the first African American woman PhD was Dr. Marie Daly in 1947. I am still searching for an earlier one.
Women chemists, especially minority women chemists, have always been the underdogs in science and chemistry. African American women were not allowed to pursue a PhD degree in chemistry until the late in the twentieth century, while white women were pursuing that degree in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Racial prejudice was a major factor. Many African American men were denied access to this degree in the United States. The list of those who were able to receive a PhD in chemistry is short. The Knox brothers were able to receive PhDs in chemistry from MIT and Harvard in the 1930s. Some men had to go abroad to get a degree; Percy Julian obtained his from the University of Vienna in Austria.
In 1975, the American Association for the Advancement of Science sponsored a meeting of minority women scientists to explore what it was like to be both a woman and minority in science. The meeting resulted in a report entitled The Double Bind: The Price of being a Minority woman in Science. Most of the women experienced strong negative influences associated with race or ethnicity as children and teenagers but felt more strongly the handicaps for women as they moved into post-college training in graduate schools or later in careers. When the women entered their career stage, they encountered both racism and sexism.
STS-47 Mission Specialist Mae Jemison in the center aisle of the Spacelab Japan (SLJ) science module aboard the Earth-orbiting Endeavour, Orbiter Vehicle (OV) 105. NASA. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
This is still true today in some respects, but it is often unconscious. For example, the organizers of an International Conference for Quantum Chemistry recently posted a list of the speakers. They were all men (the race of the speakers is not known). Three women who are pillars in the field protested and started a petition to add women to the speakers list. The organizers retracted the speaker list.
In 2009 the National Science Foundation sponsored a Women of Color conference. When I attended the meeting and listened to the speakers, it sounded as if not much had changed for women in science. There is still racism and sexism. Even Asian-American women, who do not constitute a minority within the field, were experiencing the same problems.
The 2010 Bayer Facts of Science Education XIV Survey polled 1,226 female and minority chemists and chemical engineers about their childhood, academic, and workplace experiences. The report stated that, girls are not encouraged to study STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field early in school, 60% colleges and universities discourage women in science, and 44% of professors discourage female students from pursing STEM degrees.
The top three reasons for the underrepresentation are:
- Lack of quality education in math and science in poor school districts
- Stereotypes that the STEM isn’t for girls
- Financial problems related to the cost of college education
In spite of all the negative information in these reports, women are pursuing STEM careers. In the National Organization for the Professional Advancement of Black Chemists and Chemical Engineers (NOBCChE) women dominate the organization. Years ago, men dominated that organization. The current vice president of the organization is a woman chemical engineer, who is is striving to make the organization better. Many of the NOBCChE female members went to Historically Black Colleges (HBCUs) for undergraduate degree before getting into major universities to obtain their PhD. The HBCUs are the savior for African American students because the professors and administration strive to help them succeed in college.
I am amazed at all these African American women scientists have done in spite of racism and sexism — succeeding and thriving in industry, working as professors and department chairs in major research universities, and providing role models to young women and men who are contemplating a STEM career.
Jeannette Elizabeth Brown is the author of African American Women Chemists. She is a former Faculty Associate at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. She is the 2004 Société de Chimie Industrielle (American Section) Fellow of the Chemical Heritage Foundation, and consistently lectures on African American women in chemistry.
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Cassie Ammerman, Publicity
Patricia Fara has just released her latest book, Science: A Four Thousand Year History. Sweeping through the centuries, from ancient Babylon right up to the latest cutting-edge research in genetics and particle physics, she illuminates the financial interests, imperial ambitions, and publishing enterprises that have made science the powerful global phenomenon that it is today. In this article, she discusses her feelings about some great scientific women of the past.
I’m an example of the leaky pipeline phenomenon: I have a degree in physics, but I’ve never been inside a laboratory since I left university and moved from Oxford to London. Instead, I spent fifteen years running an educational publishing company, and then switched tracks to become an academic historian of science at Cambridge.
Sometimes I feel as if I’ve betrayed all those women of the past who struggled so hard to establish opportunities for female scientists. In particular, I often think of Hertha Ayrton, the electrical engineer who in 1904 became the first woman to deliver a lecture at London’s Royal Society. Although denied a Fellowship because she was married, Ayrton remained resilient. “I do not agree with sex being brought into science at all,” she told a journalist; “The idea of ‘woman and science’ is completely irrelevant. Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not.” Unfortunately, these words still need repeating today.
My greatest heroine is Émilie du Châtelet (1706-49), who translated Isaac Newton’s great book on gravity from the original Latin. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant admired her work so much that he declared “a woman who…conducts learned controversies on mechanics like the Marquise de Chatelier might as well have a beard.” As well as writing other science books and articles, she also co-authored with Voltaire a major French book on Newtonian physics – but I wonder how she felt when she saw that only his name was on the title-page? For over two centuries, she has been cast in the role of Voltaire’s mistress, as though she were his possession or at best an intelligent secretary.
Du Châtelet constantly fought for the education and the publishing opportunities that she craved. Faced by overt exclusion from academic circles as well as ingrained doubts about her own capacity, Du Châtelet was caught between conflicting, unsatisfactory stereotypes – the learned eccentric, the flamboyant lover, the devoted mother. Women had virtually no educational opportunities, and were believed to be intellectually as well as physically inferior to men. Obviously brilliant as a child, Du Châtelet resented the discrimination that made it impossible for her to pursue the same career as a man. Born into a wealthy aristocratic family, she benefited from an enlightened father. Instead of sending her to a convent school, he decided that she should be taught at home, and she received the sort of education that was more typical for boys than for girls. She could apparently speak six languages when she was only twelve years old, and when she reached her late twenties she started to immerse herself in Newtonian physics and mathematics.
Trapped between the sexes, du Châtelet conformed to the expectations of the time by loving to shop, dance and entertain. But she also transgressed social norms by dedicating herself to Newtonian natural philosophy. When deadlines were close, she scarcely slept, plunging her hands into ice-cold water to keep herself awake. Despite her unconventional lifestyle, du Châtelet still performed the traditional time-filling tasks expected of a wife and mother. Some of these she imposed on herself, but in other cases it seems that she yielded to pressure from her contemporaries, as if conditioned from birth into a form of psychological captivity. But she encouraged women to foster their own happiness by studying in order “to console them for everything which makes them dependent on men.”
Like many clever women today, even in the midst of achievement du Châtelet lacked self-confidence – “God has refused me any kind of genius,” she once confided. She wrote in secrecy, trapped in a dilemma: she desperately needed constructive criticism, but risked painful mockery by revealing that a woman was daring to engage in such innovative work. Many female scholars experienced similar conflicts. Almost a hundred years later, the English mathematical physicist Mary Somerville was similarly reticent about her abilities. “I hid my papers as soon as the bell announced a visitor,” she confessed, “lest anyone should discover my secret.”
Voltaire recognised du Châtelet’s brilliance by celebrating her as “a great man whose only fault was being a woman.” I’ve tried to pay my own tribute to her by obeying her request: “Judge me for my own merits.” I’ve rewritten science’s history by describing not only what happened inside laboratories and libraries, but also what happened outside – and that means paying more attention to the activities of women like du Châtelet. Good translations are vital for spreading new ideas, and modern international science could not have developed without them. Women made different contributions from men – but different need not mean insignificant.
