Scientists who broke the gender barrier

Book review of Ten Women Who Changed Science and the World

This book consists of short profiles of ten extraordinary scientists who happened to be women. Each in their own individual way broke through glass ceilings and all of them changed the world. The authors decided that they would focus on people who were dead, perhaps because it is easier to place a completed life in context. In other respects, their choice of subjects range across different fields.  
 
Gender discrimination across the STEM disciplines  has become a “hot button” issue in the past few years as women working in these areas have become more assertive about narrating their  experiences. The discrimination is so deeply ingrained that it is utterly normalised in the way popular culture treats women in STEM. It shows up at school when girls are told that they are intrinsically bad at maths; it shows up in poor gender ratios in higher education. It showed up, circa 2015 with a distinguished male scientist “joking” that he couldn’t work in the lab with “ distractingly sexy” women who “fall in love and cry when you criticise them”. 

 
Each of the women profiled here had to deal with this all pervasive problem in their own life. To take one famous instance, when the widowed Marie Curie won her second Nobel Prize in 1911, (Chemistry for isolating radium) the Nobel Committee actually requested her to decline the honour! The reason: She was in a relationship with a married colleague. She was always referred to in academia and media as “Madame” rather than docteur or professor. 
 

In 1964, Dorothy Hodgkin was hailed as the “Oxford housewife and mother” who had somehow won a Nobel Prize for developing x-ray crystallography techniques that helped define protein molecular structures. Rachel Carson, who pioneered the environmental movement, was ridiculed as a “ romantic writer” despite her credentials as a marine biologist. Trudy Elion, another Nobel laureate, was denied a research position literally because she was “too pretty”. 

 
The women profiled include anaesthesiologist, Virginia Apgar, who invented the Apgar Score, which is used the world over for the instant assessment of neo-natal health; Rachel Carson, whose bestseller  Silent Spring sparked environmental consciousness; astronomer, Henrietta Leavitt, who work on cepheid variable stars led to methods for judging the expansion of the universe; physicist, Lise Meitner, who was a nuclear fission pioneer; Elsie Widdowson, who worked out the technique of fortifying food with vitamins; Dorothy Hodgkin, crystallographer (and housewife!); Gertrude Elion who revolutionised drug design methods; Rita Levi-Montalcini who worked out nerve growth; Chien-Shiung Wu who worked on the Manhattan Project and subsequently produced a string of important experimental results in physics; and Marie Curie, who was, among other things, the first woman professor in France.  

 
Given the diversity of fields and backgrounds, it’s hardly surprising that these ten women had very different personalities and enormous variations in their life experiences. These lively accounts make that very evident. Some of them were strongly combative people,  others quieter and more self effacing. However, despite being different personality types, they all had one thing in common,  quite apart from  being extraordinarily gifted in their respective disciplines:  they all possessed a quality best described as bloody-mindedness. 
 
They refused to take no for an answer. They smashed academic barriers by insisting on learning things that women weren't allowed to learn.  They broke glass ceilings in their workplaces, they survived racial persecution and discrimination in several instances. 

 
Meitner had to flee Nazi Germany; Chien faced racial suspicion as an Asian American while working on a top secret American military project. Curie’s daughter, Irene, (herself a Nobel laureate) once lamented that her mother was “a brave daughter of France” in popular reckoning when she won international recognition, and she was a “ Polish immigrant”  at other times, such as when she was refused admittance to the Academie Francaise. 
 
Although the authors say they tried to treat their subjects as “ordinary woman” who survived family tragedies and disasters and did extraordinary things, these were obviously very unusual people. It is frankly, impossible to do justice to the lives of 10 such personalities in an average of 30 pages each.  It is even more difficult since it is necessary to get abstruse scientific concepts across, and every essay involves getting into different subjects at that. 

 
This book does a fair job of compressing those lives and careers, without reading like Wikipedia entries. It is an excellent introduction to  the lives of some of the smartest people you might never have heard of, written in easy prose with reasonably lucid explanations of the science. But each of these women deserves a full-length biography to themselves rather than this set of very brief lives.
 


Ten Women Who Changed Science and the World 

Catherine Whitlock, Rhodri Evans 

Hachette; Rs 599; 320 pages