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.
