Science, society & stereotypes: examining the lives of trailblazing women in STEM

I was recently flicking through a glossily illustrated Australian book on the history of STEM when I found the name of a pioneer I didn't recognise: Marjory Warren, a British surgeon who is best known today as the 'mother of modern geriatric medicine'. Looking in the index I could find only two other women scientists - compared to over one hundred and twenty men - in a book five hundred pages long! The other two examples were Marie Curie (of course) and American astronomer Vera Rubin. Considering that the book was published in 2008, I was astounded by how skewed this seemed to be. Granted that prior to the twentieth century, few women had the option of becoming involved in science and mathematics; but for any history of STEM, wouldn't the last century contain the largest proportion of subject material?

I therefore thought it would be interesting to choose case studies from the twentieth century to see what sort of obstacles - unique or otherwise - that women scientists faced until recently. If you ask most people to name a female scientist then Marie Curie would probably top the list, although a few countries might have national favourites: perhaps Rosalind Franklin in the UK or Rachel Carson in the USA, for example. Rather than choose the more obvious candidates such as these I have selected four women I knew only a little about, ordered by their date of birth.

Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) was an American cytogeneticist who was ahead of her time in terms of both research and social attitudes. Although her mother didn't want her to train as a scientist, she was lucky to have a father who thought differently to the accepted wisdom - which was that female scientists would be unable to find a husband! McClintock's abilities showed early in her training, leading to post-graduate fellowships which in turn generated cutting-edge research.

At the age of forty-two, Barbara McClintock was only the third woman to be elected to the US National Academy of Sciences. However, her rapid rise within the scientific establishment didn't necessarily assist her: such was the conservative nature of universities that women were not allowed to attend faculty meetings. 

After publishing her research to broad acceptance, McClintock's work then moved into what today would broadly come under the term of epigenetics. Several decades' ahead of its time, it was seen as too radical by most of her peers and so after facing intense opposition she temporarily stopped publishing her results. It is unlikely that being a woman was entirely responsible for the hostility to her work; similar resistance has frequently been experienced throughout the STEM avant-garde. It seems that only when other researchers found similar results to McClintock did the more hidebound sections of the discipline re-examine their negative attitude towards her work.

There has been a fair amount of discussion as to whether it was because McClintock was female, or because of her secretive personality (both at home as well as at work, for she never married) - or a combination of both - that delayed her receipt of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Even by the slow standards of that particular awards committee, 1983 was rather late in the day. However, by then she had already been the recipient of numerous other awards and prizes.

Regardless of the recognition it gave her, Barbara McClintock relished scientific research for the sake of uncovering nature's secrets. In that regard, she said: "I just have been so interested in what I was doing and it's been such a pleasure, such a deep pleasure, that I never thought of stopping...I've had a very, very, satisfying and interesting life."

Tikvah Alper (1909-1995) was a South African radiobiologist who worked on prions - otherwise known as 'misfolded' or 'rogue' proteins - and their relationship to certain diseases. Her outstanding abilities were recognised early, allowing her to study physics at the University of Cape Town. She then undertook post-graduate work in Berlin with the nuclear fission pioneer Lise Meitner, only to be forced to leave before completing her doctorate due to the rise in anti-Semitism in Germany.

Having had her research curtailed by her ethnicity, Alper was initially also stymied on her return to South Africa thanks to her private life: due to the misogynist rules of that nation's universities, married women were not allowed to remain on the faculty. Therefore, along with her husband the veterinary medicine researcher Max Sterne, she continued her work from home. However, eventually her talents were acknowledged and she was made head of the Biophysics section at the South African National Physics Laboratory in 1948. Then only three years later, Alper's personal life intervened once again; this time, she and her husband were forced to leave South Africa due to their opposition to apartheid.

After a period of unpaid research in London, Alper turned to studying the effects of radiation on different types of cells, rising to become head of the Medical Research Council Radiopathology Unit at Hammersmith Hospital. Alper's theories regarding prions were eventually accepted into the mainstream and even after retirement she continued working, writing a renowned text book, Cellular Radiobiology, in 1979. 

Alper's life suggests she was very much a problem solver, tackling anything that she felt needed progressing. As a result of this ethos she worked on a wide range of issues from the standing of women in science and society, to the injustice of apartheid, even to learning and teaching sign language after one of her son's was born profoundly deaf. Despite being forced to leave several nations for different reasons - not because she was a woman - Alper was someone who refused to concede defeat. In that respect she deserves much wider recognition today.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1910-1994) was interested in chemistry, in particular crystals, from a young age. Although women of her generation were encouraged in this area as a hobby, it was highly unusual for them to seek paid employment in the field. Luckily, her mother encouraged her interest and gave Hodgkin a book on x-ray crystallography for her sixteenth birthday, a gift which determined her career path. 

After gaining a first-class honours chemistry degree at Oxford, she moved to Cambridge for doctoral work under the x-ray crystallography pioneer J.D. Bernal. Not only did Hodgkin then manage to find a research post in her chosen field, working at both Cambridge and Oxford, she was able to pursue cutting edge work labelled as too difficult by her contemporaries, Hodgkin and her colleagues achieved ground-breaking results in critical areas, resolving the structure of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. 

Hodgkin's gained international renown, appearing to have faced few of the difficulties experienced by her female contemporaries. In addition to having a well-equipped laboratory at Oxford, she was elected to the Royal Society in 1947 and became its Wolfson Research Professor in 1960. She was also awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1964 - the only British woman to have been a recipient to date. Other prestigious awards followed, including the Royal Society's Copley Medal in 1976; again, no other woman has yet received that award.

Presumably in response to the loss of four maternal uncles in the First World War, Hodgkin was an active promoter of international peace. During the 1950s her views were deemed too left wing by the American government and she had to attain special permission to enter the United States to attend science conferences. Ironically, the Soviet Union honoured her on several occasions, admitting her as a foreign member of the Academy of Sciences and later awarding her the Lenin Peace Prize. She also communicated with her Chinese counterparts and became committed to nuclear disarmament, both through CND and Operation Pugwash.

Her work on insulin, itself of enormous importance, is just one facet of her life. Ironically, as someone associated with left-wing politics, she is often remembered today as being one of Margaret Thatcher's lecturers; despite their different socio-political leanings, they maintained a friendship into later life. All this was despite the increasing disability Hodgkin suffered from her mid-twenties due to chronic rheumatoid arthritis, which left her with seemingly minimal dexterity. Clearly, Dorothy Hodgkin was a dauntless fighter in her professional and personal life.

Marie Tharp (1920-2006) was an American geologist best known for her oceanographic cartography work regarding the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. Despite followed the advice of her father (a surveyor) and taking an undergraduate degree in humanities and music, Tharp also took a geology class; perhaps helping her father as a child boosted her interest in this subject. It enabled her to complete a master's degree in geology, thanks to the dearth of male students during the Second World War. Certainly, it was an unusual avenue for women to be interested in; at the time less than four percent of all earth sciences doctorates in the USA were awarded to women.

From a modern perspective, geology during the first half of the twentieth century appears to have been exceedingly hidebound and conservative. Tharp found she could not undertake field trips to uncover fossil fuel deposits, as women were only allowed to do office-based geological work - one explanation for this sexism being that having women on board ship brought bad luck! In fact, it wasn't until 1968 that Tharp eventually joined an expedition. 

However, thanks to painstaking study of her colleague Bruce Heezen's data, Tharp was able to delineate geophysical features such as the mid-Atlantic ridge and consider the processes that generated them. Her map of the Atlantic Ocean floor was far more sophisticated than anything that had previously been created, giving her insights denied to both her contemporaries as well as her predecessors. As such, Tharp suspected that the long-denigrated continental drift hypothesis, as envisaged by Alfred Wegener three decades previously, was correct. It was here that she initially came unstuck, with Heezen labelling her enthusiasm for continental drift as 'girl talk'. Let's hope that phrase wouldn't be used today!

In time though, yet more data (including the mirrored magnetic striping either side of the mid-Atlantic ridge) proved Tharp correct. Heezen's incredulity was replaced by acceptance, as continental drift was reformulated via seafloor spreading to become the theory of plate tectonics. Mainstream geology finally approved what Wegener had proposed, and Marie Tharp was a fundamental part of that paradigm shift. 

What is interesting is that despite receiving many awards in her later years, including the National Geographic Society's Hubbard Medal in 1978, her name is mentioned far less often than other pioneers of plate tectonics such as Harry Hess, Frederick Vine, Drummond Matthews, even Heezen. It's unclear if Tharp's comparative lack of recognition is due to her being female or because she was only one of many researchers working along similar lines. Her own comment from the era suggests that just being a women scientist was reason enough to dismiss her work: she noted that other professional's viewed her ideas with attitudes ranging "from amazement to skepticism to scorn."

There are countless other examples that would serve as case studies, including women from non-Western nations, but these four show the variety of experiences women scientists underwent during the twentieth century, ranging from a level of misogyny that would be unthinkable today to an early acceptance of the value of their work and a treatment not seemingly different from their male colleagues. I was surprised to find such a range of circumstances and attitudes, proving that few things are as straightforward as they are frequently portrayed. However, these examples do show that whatever culture they grow up in, the majority of the population consider its values to be perfectly normal; a little bit of thought - or hindsight - shows that just because something is the norm, doesn't necessarily mean it's any good. When it comes to the attitudes today, you only have to read the news to realise there's still some way to go before women in STEM are treated the same as their male counterparts.

An uneasy alliance: science, politics and scientifically-trained politicians

Last April, whilst speaking of the need for technological innovation in order to promote economic growth, President Obama joked that his physics grades made him an unlikely candidate for "scientist in chief". With the recent unease surrounding the (now thankfully dropped) takeover bid of leading UK pharmaceutical company Astra Zeneca by the American firm Pfizer, it seems appropriate to investigate whether science at the national level could be better supported if more politicians had a scientific background or were at least more savvy in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects. After all, had the Pfizer bid proved successful, the British pharmaceutical sector was predicted to lose in the long term, both scientifically and economically.

There are many statistics that prove the notion that the past half century has seen a major dumbing down in Western politics, such as the reduction in average sound bite length for US presidential candidates from over forty seconds in the late 1960s to barely seven seconds today. It's quite easy to suggest that politicians are simply following mainstream societal trends, but such lack of substance only serves to further distance politics from science, since the latter rarely offers straightforward yes/no answers, especially in cutting-edge research.

One rather bizarre example of how little science can mean in mainstream politics can be seen in President Reagan's reliance for key policy decisions during most of his term in office on astrologer Joan Quigley. Whilst it is easy to mock the far right wing (and Reagan himself looks increasingly liberal by the standards of the Tea Party), those on the left could be equally guilty of paying short shrift to science, especially if there isn't an immediately obvious benefit to society. A combination of relativism and overdosing on political correctness make for difficulties in proclaiming judgement values: if everyone deserves an equal opportunity to air their own pet theory as to how the universe works, then science appears as just another set of beliefs.

If we look back further than the Reagan administration, how well do scientifically-inclined American Presidents fare up? Here's a brief examination of those with scientific leanings:

1. Thomas Jefferson made contributions to palaeontology and agricultural technology but perhaps more importantly promoted science as essential to national wealth. However, he was still very much man of his time, maintaining conventional Christian beliefs that sometimes overrode his scientific sensibility, including those that questioned the Biblical timescale.
2. Theodore Roosevelt is well known for what would today be called sustainable development, creating national parks and wildlife refuges at the same time as promoting a balanced exploitation of natural resources. He went on expeditions to Brazil and Africa, ostensibly to find specimens for the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, although the results appear more akin to the curious modern phenomenon of scientific whaling (in other words, somewhat lacking in the conservation stakes). Roosevelt also considered a "thorough knowledge of the Bible...worth more than a college education".
3. Jimmy Carter gained a Bachelor of Science degree and later majored in reactor technology and nuclear physics whilst maintaining a conventional Christian faith. During the energy crisis of the late 1970s he seemingly promoted alternative energy, most famously having solar panels installed on the White House roof. However, in some ways he resembled Nineteenth Century Anglican scientists such as the Dean of Westminster William Buckland, particularly in his looking for the proof of God's existence in nature.
4. An example from the other side of the Atlantic can be seen in Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, who trained in chemistry under the Nobel laureate Dorothy Hodgkin. Despite her right-wing, monetarist policies (incidentally the political antithesis of Hodgkin), Thatcher has been acclaimed as an active environmentalist: her late 1980s speeches supported action to combat climate change; policies to rapidly phase out CFCs; and the promotion of sustainable development. Yet commentators have viewed Thatcher's concerns for cost-benefit analysis as taking precedence over science, with blue sky thinking getting scant attention. At a practical level, in 1987 she sold the Plant Breeding Institute at Cambridge to Unilever, which has been deemed detrimental in the long-term to British public science.

The only current major Western leader with a scientific background is the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has a doctorate in physical chemistry. In contrast, eight out of the nine top government officials in China have backgrounds in STEM subjects. Is it any wonder they have already got their own space station and have become the world's largest exporter of high technology, now only second to the USA in terms of annual expenditure on research and development? Yes, the rate of progress has come at enormous environmental and personal cost, but the way in which the Chinese government is clearly imbued with science and technology is to be marvelled at.

From looking at the above examples, it doesn't appear that scientifically-trained national leaders have substantially improved science's output or public opinion and have on occasion been quite detrimental. The late Stephen Schneider, author of various reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), stated that since is up to governments (and to some extent the general public as well) to formulate policy rather than scientists, the former need to understand not just the data, but how to interpret it. In the UK, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills recently launched a public consultation over spending plans for the research infrastructure of the next five years. But scientific endeavours require a certain level of knowledge and that least common of commodities, critical thinking. Science just doesn't adhere to the simple black versus white mentality so beloved of Hollywood.

This is where scientifically-literate politicians hopefully come into their own, being able to accurately represent to the electorate such difficult material as probability statistics, as well as understanding risks and benefits themselves. If anything, science will only fare better if the majority of politicians have a more thorough science education, rather than just relying on the occasional professionally-trained key statesperson. But therein lies an obvious catch-22: how to persuade politicians to invest more funds in science education? I suppose it starts with us voters...