Women in science

The topic of women in science is a contentious issue of gender roles in academe, industry, politics, religion, and culture, as well as a field of study in the history of science and the sociology of science. Quotes The administration and faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) performed the first and most famous in-depth study on the status of women faculty within a particular institution. A group of senior women on the faculty had gathered preliminary evidence that they had less laboratory space, less access to research funding, and lower salaries than their male counterparts. In addition, they were infrequently represented on committees that made decisions about hiring and research funding. MIT's administration responded by researching the charges, finding that they were accurate, and taking steps to correct the inequities. The abstract to their report is an excellent description of the issues that still confront women scientists and analysis of why they went unrecognized by administration as well as by the women themselves. Ellen Daniell, https://books.google.com/books?id=HmUlKQfYWQoC&pg=PR17 xvii–xviii Introduction Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists 0300133790 January 2006 Yale University Press (See A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT The MIT Faculty Newsletter XI 4 March 1999 http://web.mit/fnl/women/women.html) I think most importantly, men tend to get the top jobs, with which they get a bully pulpit for publication and speaking or exerting authority. I think women can be much more appreciated in science than they are. Estella Leopold, Interview with PS Medalist Estella Leopold Priscum, Newsletter of the Paleontological Society 21 1 3–5 Winter 2014 https://www.paleosoc.org/assets/docs/Priscum_Winter2014.pdf (quote from p. 5) It has seemed to me that Man men can have a hard time accepting that women can be smarter, particularly when a woman points out mistakes that the man has made. Throughout Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard#Career my career, I often had difficulties in getting a point across because the men couldn’t bear it that I might ‘win’, and in some cases this got even more difficult after the Nobel Prize. Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Nobel Laureate, as quoted by Katherine Brown in: Development 2017 144 3851–3854 10.1242/dev.159582 An interview with Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard https://www.bio.mpg.de/189753/Development2017_full.pdf (quote from p. 3853) ... although close to nothing was known, until recently, of the history of women in American science, women have been an integral part of the scientific community for well over a century. I can still recall my astonishment when I discovered in 1972 some women's entries in the old American Men and Women of Science#Background American Men [sic] of Science directories, and when I read biographies of several scientists in the then-new Notable American Women. Here were people who had been present at many of the familiar places and events, but who were totally unknown even to those of us well versed in the history of American science. I felt like a modern Alice who had fallen down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of the history of science that was familiar in some respects but distorted and alien in many others. Learning more about these women and bringing their stories into closer connection with the rest of the history of this period became a compelling and absorbing intellectual task. Magaret W. Rossiter, Preface Women Scientists in America: Volume One. Struggles and Strategies to 1940 Johns Hopkins University Press 1982 https://books.google.com/books?id=jJr6ZfkDbE4C&pg=PR11 xi 0-8018-2509-1 I was an astronomy student at Vassar College on October 1, 1947, 100 years after the night that Maria Mitchell discovered a comet. Only recently have I realized that no note whatsoever was taken of the centennial of this discovery by the first prominent List of women astronomers female astronomer in the United States. Perhaps on that day one of my friends or I irreverently tied a bright scarf around the stern-looking bust of Mitchell that sat in a niche of the observatory building where she taught for many years. But she deserved more.What I do remember of 1947 is that I wrote a postcard to Princeton University asking for a catalog of the graduate school. Hugh Stott Taylor Sir Hugh Taylor, the eminent chemist and dean of the graduate school, took the time to answer by writing back that as Princeton did not accept women in the graduate physics and astronomy program, he would not send a catalog. Princeton did not accept women in graduate physics until 1971, in graduate astronomy until 1975, and in graduate math programs until 1976. Vera Rubin, Women's work: Women in modern astronomy Science 86 July/August 1986 7 58–65 (quote from p. 58; article based on a lunch talk given, by invitation of Shirley M. Malcom, at the headquarters of the American Association for the Advancement of Science AAAS; Science (1979–1986 magazine) Science 86 was sold in 1986 to Time Inc.; article reprinted in Women's Work Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters Masters of Modern Physics Springer Science & Business Media 1996 9781563962318 https://books.google.com/books?id=OVBUt6yrMtAC&pg=PA164) ... As early as 1982, Margaret W. Rossiter Margaret Rossiter's superbly researched first volume on women scientists in America startled its readers with its meticulously drawn picture of the double bind women scientists fell into from the late nineteenth into the early twentieth century. Caught between 'two almost mutually exclusive stereotypes' they were 'atypical' as both women and scientists. Thus, even as higher education opened up to them, they found it easier to be educated in science than to be successfully employed in it: an impasse which proved to be long-lasting. Ruth Watts, Chapter 1. Science, gender and education Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History Routledge 2013 9780415253079 https://books.google.com/books?id=FWGvfScw7hsC&printsec=frontcover#v=snippet&q=as%20early%20as%201982%2C%20Margaret%20Rossiter&f=false (1st edition, 2007) External links Category:History of science Category:Sociology Category:Women