Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World

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Astronomer Jill Tarter is best known for her work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Tarter was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2004. [126] She is the former director of SETI. [127] The involvement of women in medicine occurred in several early western civilizations, and the study of natural philosophy in ancient Greece was open to women. Women contributed to the proto-science of alchemy in the first or second centuries CE During the Middle Ages, religious convents were an important place of education for women, and some of these communities provided opportunities for women to contribute to scholarly research. The 11th century saw the emergence of the first universities; women were, for the most part, excluded from university education. [1] Outside academia, botany was the science that benefitted most from contributions of women in early modern times. [2] The attitude toward educating women in medical fields appears to have been more liberal in Italy than in other places. The first known woman to earn a university chair in a scientific field of studies was eighteenth-century Italian scientist Laura Bassi.

The Junta de Damas de Honor y Mérito (Committee of Ladies of Honour and Merit): Children’s parchments in the Madrid Foundling House (1802) Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze and her husband Antoine Lavoisier rebuilt the field of chemistry, which had its roots in alchemy and at the time was a convoluted science dominated by George Stahl's theory of phlogiston. Paulze accompanied Lavoisier in his lab, making entries into lab notebooks and sketching diagrams of his experimental designs. The training she had received allowed her to accurately and precisely draw experimental apparatuses, which ultimately helped many of Lavoisier's contemporaries to understand his methods and results. Paulze translated various works about phlogiston into French. One of her most important translation was that of Richard Kirwan's Essay on Phlogiston and the Constitution of Acids, which she both translated and critiqued, adding footnotes as she went along and pointing out errors in the chemistry made throughout the paper. [68] Paulze was instrumental in the 1789 publication of Lavoisier's Elementary Treatise on Chemistry, which presented a unified view of chemistry as a field. This work proved pivotal in the progression of chemistry, as it presented the idea of conservation of mass as well as a list of elements and a new system for chemical nomenclature. She also kept strict records of the procedures followed, lending validity to the findings Lavoisier published. Women play an increasing role in environmental sciences and conservation biology. In fact, women played a foremost role in the development of these disciplines. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson proved an important impetus to the conservation movement and the later banning of chemical pesticides. Women played an important role in conservation biology including the famous work of Dian Fossey, who published the famous Gorillas in theHenrietta Swan Leavitt first published her study of variable stars in 1908. This discovery became known as the "period-luminosity relationship" of Cepheid variables. [102] Our picture of the universe was changed forever, largely because of Leavitt's discovery. They are books for any woman who is in a minority. Particularly in a subject like mine – physics – women often feel very isolated. These are books to encourage them, to make them think about their circumstances and to help them reflect on if they feel different, why they feel different, and whether it matters. Etheldred Benett (1775−1845): Preface to Catalogue of the Organic Remains of the County of Wiltshire (1831) Women in the History of Science is a reader that offers a surprisingly comprehensive range of primary sources presented with additional resources that make them readily accessible for multiple readers at every level of education.'

Women appear to do less well than men (in terms of degree, rank, and salary) in the fields that have been traditionally dominated by women, such as nursing. In 1991 women attributed 91% of the PhDs in nursing, and men held 4% of full professorships in nursing. [ citation needed] In the field of psychology, where women earn the majority of PhDs, women do not fill the majority of high rank positions in that field. [133] [ citation needed]Gerty Cori was a biochemist who discovered the mechanism by which glycogen, a derivative of glucose, is transformed in the muscles to form lactic acid, and is later reformed as a way to store energy. For this discovery she and her colleagues were awarded the Nobel prize in 1947, making her the third woman and the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in science. She was the first woman ever to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Cori is among several scientists whose works are commemorated by a U.S. postage stamp. [109] Late 20th century to early 21st century [ edit ] At the Saving the Web: The Ethics and Challenges of Preserving What's on the Internet at Room LJ-119, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, at the Kluge Center, on 14, 15 and 16 June 2016, Dame Wendy Hall At the Saving the Web: The Ethics and Challenges of Preserving What's on the Internet at Room LJ-119, Thomas Jefferson Building, Library of Congress, at the Kluge Center, on 14, 15 and 16 June 2016, Allison Hegel, a computer scientist and data scientist Ann Druyan is an American writer, lecturer and producer specializing in cosmology and popular science. Druyan has credited her knowledge of science to the 20 years she spent studying with her late husband, Carl Sagan, rather than formal academic training. [ citation needed] She was responsible for the selection of music on the Voyager Golden Record for the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 exploratory missions. Druyan also sponsored the Cosmos 1 spacecraft. Josefa Amar y Borbón (1749−1833): An extract from Discurso sobre la educación física y moral de las mujeres (Discourse on women’s physical and moral education) (1790) Scottish scientist Mary Fairfax Somerville carried out experiments in magnetism, presenting a paper entitled 'The Magnetic Properties of the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum' to the Royal Society in 1826, the second woman to do so. She also wrote several mathematical, astronomical, physical and geographical texts, and was a strong advocate for women's education. In 1835, she and Caroline Herschel were the first two women elected as Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society. [77] 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.

Mary Seacole (1805−1881): Extract from Seacole’s autobiography Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands (1857) Marie Allitt (she/her) Is it a self-reinforcing stereotype, in the sense that fewer women going into physics itself gives credence to the stereotype that women are bad at physics?

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] Canadian-born Maud Menten worked in the US and Germany. Her most famous work was on enzyme kinetics together with Leonor Michaelis, based on earlier findings of Victor Henri. This resulted in the Michaelis–Menten equations. Menten also invented the azo-dye coupling reaction for alkaline phosphatase, which is still used in histochemistry. She characterised bacterial toxins from B. paratyphosus, Streptococcus scarlatina and Salmonella ssp., and conducted the first electrophoretic separation of proteins in 1944. She worked on the properties of hemoglobin, regulation of blood sugar level, and kidney function. 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. 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]

Sati-un-Nisa (d. 1646): Ma’asir-ul-Umara (Biography of the Notables) (1780) and photographs of the Mausoleum Saheli Burj (Female Companion’s Monument) (2020) Alice Perry is understood to be the first woman to graduate with a degree in civil engineering in the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in 1906 at Queen's College, Galway, Ireland. [89] In 1925, Harvard graduate student Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin demonstrated for the first time from existing evidence on the spectra of stars that stars were made up almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium, one of the most fundamental theories in stellar astrophysics. [100] [102] You wrote to me earlier that you think of these books as for women in science rather than about women in science.The Crimean War (1854–6) contributed to establishing nursing as a profession, making Florence Nightingale a household name. A public subscription allowed Nightingale to establish a school of nursing in London in 1860, and schools following her principles were established throughout the UK. [80] Nightingale was also a pioneer in public health as well as a statistician. 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]