By Louis Jagger

Today is International Women’s Day, and Elements is taking the opportunity to highlight the contribution of women to the traditionally male-dominated world of scientific discovery.

It need hardly be stated that in the current age, female scientists are far more prevalent than at any other stage of human history, and while the scientific community is clearly still not gender-balanced, progress has been made. Nobel-winning DNA discoveries of Crick and Watson have been downplayed in comparison to the previously-much-ignored research of Rosalind Franklin, without which their suppositions couldn’t have been confirmed. Marie Curie’s name adorns the UK’s largest cancer care charity. Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space, held a lofty position in the government of the Soviet Union, and still commands enormous respect from the Russian people.

Yet it is not just these celebrated individuals who have defied the conventions of millennia to advance the cause of science while being female. For we have Stephanie Kwolek, inventor of Kevlar, to consider, along with Barbara McClintock, whose work in genetics, identifying ‘controlling elements’ which cause identical cells to develop into different organic devices, won her a Nobel Prize many years after her groundbreaking work. We have Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper, who were respectively instrumental in the invention and development of computing, and Emmy Noether, whose innovative brilliance in the fields of algebra and theoretical physics saw her granted a lectureship at the University of Göttingen in the early 20th century.

We have the oppressed, such as Ida Noddack, who first hypothesised nuclear fission and was ignored, and Lise Meitner, who helped invent nuclear fission and was snubbed by the Nobel panel in favour of the man she worked with. We have the murdered, such as Dian Fossey, who throughout the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s grew to understand and popularise the social habits and plight of African gorillas, until her brutal slaying, possibly at the hands of those who could stand her anti-poaching cry no longer.

Then there are Caroline Herschel and Maria Mitchell, who lit up the 18th and 19th centuries with their brilliant astronomy, both plucking comets from the sky like apples. Mitchell was American and a social activist; Herschel was German and came out from under the shadow of her brother Wilhelm, the man who discovered Uranus, to record many important findings of her own. Alternatively, you can think of Vera Rubin, the first woman after Herschel to win the Royal Astronomical Society’s Gold Medal, a mere 168 years on. She’s a huge favourite of astrophysicists, and her work in attempting to explain the apparently gravity-shifted rotations of galaxies without finding refuge in dark matter is invaluable; hers is a singular voice and apparently she’s a hugely agreeable individual as well. As agreeable as anyone who dares to opine that Newton’s Laws might be flexible, at any rate.

Or one might discuss Mary Leakey, anthropologist and palaeontologist, along with her husband discoverer of proto-humanoid Australopithecus. Psychologist Judith Rich Harris is held in high regard, having made probing studies into how parenting can affect (or not) the psyches of children. Contemporary mathematicians worthy of repute include Ingrid Daubechies, Marina Ratner, Claire Voisin, Karen Uhlenbeck, Joan Berman, Eva Tardos or recently departed Russians Olga Oleinik and Olga Ladyzhenskaya. There’s even a cosmologist, Janna Levin, who studies black holes and other far-flung objects for a living and has still found the time to write an award-winning historical science novel.

This is a rambling and incomplete overview of the effect women have had on science within the past 300 years; suffice it to say that the list’s incompleteness is its making, for to have summarised every important woman in the realm of science would be sad indeed. And yet, most of these women have had to step out from the shadows of men, men who were expected to lead the way in furthering human knowledge. Did you know that celebrated novelist Saul Bellow had a wife, Alexandra, whose contributions to mathematics were brilliant and vital? Today shouldn’t be necessary, but while it is, I am only too happy to provide as much evidence as I can muster for woman’s instalment on a full parallel with her noisy equivalent. I end with a quote from a man, an author who wrote of the Space Race from the point of view of the engineers, striving to create the machines that would take mankind into the great beyond:

“While the aerospace industry has plenty of female engineers and scientists today, in the 1960s it was a boy’s club. There was one woman, however, in the upper ranks at North American… Her name was Rose Lunn and she was a mathematician and an expert in the arcane field of aircraft flutter dynamics. I understand that when she talked, the boys listened.” – Mike Gray, Angle of Attack