From as far back as the time of the ancient Greeks, women have played an important but understated role in science. Due to social prejudices against the female gender, up until the 20th century women were neither allowed to, nor expected to want to partake in scientific research at a professional level. Despite this, throughout history there have been women who have either had the fortune of being born into a family which indulged in their daughter’s intelligence by giving her private tutoring, or studied by themselves, borrowing current scientific texts from male family members. This led to many important discoveries which had great impact on history and scientific development as a whole. As the centuries have passed and the expectations of women’s role in society have changed, more and more women have chosen a career path within science. Now in modern day society, there is support for female scientists and the gender gap in science is being addressed.
Scientific discoveries in Europe began with the ancient Greeks. Astronomers and philosophers such as Plato, Socrates and Archimedes were among the first to challenge the belief that the gods controlled how the universe functioned, proposing ideas such as galactic structure and indivisible atoms. This put Europe at the forefront of scientific thinking at the time, and many new schools were founded such as the Platonic Academy in Athens and the Pythagorean School at Croton. All of these discoveries were made hundreds of years before equivalent notable works in other continents such as Asia. During this time however, knowledge from different parts of the world was shared through the collection in the Library at Alexandria. Although this was in Egypt, it was initially founded and curated by Greeks. Alexandria was an important centre of scientific study in this era because it joined the East with the West, bringing new discoveries together and facilitating learning.
Due to the many wars and sieges that have occurred since, few records of life at the time have survived, so it is hard to gain an accurate idea of the education of women. Also, in ancient Greece, it was a social taboo to publically discuss a well-respected woman, therefore there is almost no proof of publications by female scientists or philosophers. There are however, some reliable accounts of women making their mark on science. Iamblichus, a philosopher of the era, recorded that Damo, the daughter of Pythagoras, was entrusted with his life’s works and moved from Croton, where she was educated and taught, to Athens to teach her father’s theories.[1] Theano, the wife of Pythagoras, was also an important figure; after her husband’s death, she led teaching at the school he had set up in Croton. Her work on number theory was also influential at the time. In this period, women could not publish their work, had to be accompanied by men to scientific talk or lectures, and there are even cases of women dressing as men to be accepted into the scientific community. For example, Axiothea of Mantinea, one of Plato’s first students, had to disguise herself as a man to receive her education.[2]
After the collapse of the Roman Empire, during which the library at Alexandria was destroyed, scientific development in Western Europe suffered. Scientific knowledge was confined to monasteries and strictly controlled by the Church in the Middle Ages and Medieval times.[3] For example, Aristotle’s writings were banned and various propositions of science were prohibited, including the idea that time and space are infinite and that there was never one first human. This greatly diminished Europe’s importance in the global scientific community since, during this period, mathematical developments were being made around the world in places such as China, India and, most importantly, by Islamic scholars.
During this era, however, great sharing of scientific knowledge occurred, as many technical texts were translated from Arabic to Latin in the south of Spain and in the Toledo School of Translators. The collapse of the Byzantine Empire also led to many ancient texts being rediscovered and a great number of important scholars fleeing Constantinople to continue their studies in Western Europe. It was during this period as well that the longest standing and most important universities in Europe were established. These include: Bologna, Italy, the oldest university in Europe, founded in 1088; Salamanca, Spain, before 1218; Oxford, Cambridge, Paris and Montpellier, all at the beginning of the 13th Century.[4] These universities were initially attended only by the clergy, nobility and the upper class. Some women from wealthier families at the time may have had private tutoring, but not a single woman attended a university in Europe until the 1600s. Women during this era weren’t expected to even learn how to read or write. The most highly educated women would have been the nuns, who were literate if only to copy out religious texts and read the Bible.
The next significant discoveries in science came at the end of the Renaissance in the 16th and 17th Centuries, a period known as the Scientific Revolution. Mathematicians such as Nicolas Copernicus (1473 – 1543, Polish), Galileo Galilei (1567 – 1642, Italian) and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630, German) discovered that motion had characteristics which were universally consistent and used this theory to describe the movement of our heliocentric solar system mathematically. The publication of Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton (1647 – 1727, English), built on these ideas and included more thorough, mathematical versions of the equations derived empirically by Kepler.[1] With these new insights into mechanics came a new range of mathematical tools, including calculus, which were developed by mathematicians including Pierre de Fermat (1601 – 1665, French).
Advances were also made in thermodynamics by Evangelista Torricelli (1608 –1647, Italian), Robert Boyle (1627 – 1691, British) and Blaise Pascal (1632 – 1662, French). The development of fluid mechanics and a greater understanding of how to manipulate gases to produce work led to engineers such as Abraham Darby I (1678 – 1717, English), and Thomas Newcomen (1664–1729, English) designing steam engines. These inventions would play an immensely important role in the Industrial Revolution over the next few centuries, bringing Europe once again to the forefront of scientific development and economic wealth.[2]
Despite all the advances made during this time, the scientific community’s view of women did not change significantly. There were, however, a few female astronomers who made important contributions to the science during the 16th and 17th Centuries. For example, Sophia Brahe (1556 – 1643), a Danish astronomer, helped her brother Tycho observe and calculate the orbits of the planets. The observations they made were used as the core data for the equations of motion derived by Kepler, Tycho Brahe’s assistant.[3] Sophia Brahe was entirely self-taught in astronomy and used her own money to have works translated from Latin and other languages in order to further her studies.
There are also the important contributions of Maria Margarethe Kirch (1670 – 1720, German) and Elena Cornaro Piscopia (1646 – 1684, Italian), two pioneering women of their time who did receive the credit due to them. Kirch worked with and learned from a local, self-taught astronomer, and through him met and married another prolific astronomer of the time. Kirch was unique in that she was one of the first women to publish under her own name and to receive proper recognition for her work. She is highly valued for her work on Bessel functions and stellar parallax.[4] Together with her husband, Kirch made astronomical calendars for the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. However, after his death, she was not allowed to continue despite support from the Academy’s president, and was left without any income. It is widely thought that this was because of her gender.[5]
Elena Piscopia was the first woman to receive a university degree in 1678 from the University of Padua, Italy. She was a noblewoman of Venetian descent and studied mathematics and classical languages alongside her degree, which was in philosophy.[6] It is interesting to note that in Italy, women had been allowed to attend lectures at universities since the late 1300s. For example, Dorotea Bucca (1360–1436, Italian) held the chair for philosophy and medicine at the University of Bologna for forty years from 1390. There are also a few female doctors and physicians documented as practicing at this time, who were associated with the universities at Salerno, Bologna and Naples.[7]
In the 18th century, important work in classical mechanics was continued which led to great improvements in calculus and mathematical methods for solving physical problems. This was mostly conducted at the French Academy of Sciences, which was established in the Louvre in Paris at the turn of the century and put France at the forefront of mathematics at the time. The most notable contributions were by French mathematicians including Joseph-Louis Lagrange (1736 – 1813), Pierre-Simon marquis de Laplace (1749 – 1827), Adrian-Marie Legendre (1752 – 1833) and also Leonhard Euler (1707 – 1783, Swiss). For the first three centuries of the Academy’s existence women were not allowed to become members, although there were several female correspondents. The first woman to become a full member was Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (born 1923, French), a theoretical physicist and mathematician in 1979.
Meanwhile, in England during the 18th century, great advances were taking place in the Royal Society. With Sir Isaac Newton as its president from 1703 until his death in 1727, the Society’s reputation increased and the number of members more than doubled since its establishment. Newton’s work on mechanics and optics went on to influence research in many other European countries during the 18th century, inspiring and attracting many more scientific minds than in other continents during that era. The main role of the Society at the time was to stage and promote scientific demonstrations and lectures on new discoveries from Britain and Europe. This helped spread scientific knowledge between the Britain and the continent.
Investigation into the origins of electricity was also undertaken by Luigi Galvani (1737 – 1798, Italian) and Alessandro Volta (1745 – 1827, Italian) at the university of Bologna, Italy, who discovered that electricity could influence the nervous system. These developments in the subject were perhaps inspired by the work of Laura Bassi (1711 – 1778, Italian) who, along with her husband, conducted research into the medical applications of electricity amongst other things. Bassi was the first woman to officially hold a teaching position at a European university when, in 1732, she became professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna aged 21. However, this incredible achievement did not dominate her life. She married and had twelve children with Giuseppe Veratti, gained a more respectable teaching post and continued to lecture from her home. Bassi taught for around three decades, wrote 28 papers on physics and was appointed chair of experimental physics at the Institute of Sciences with her husband as her teaching assistant.[8]
With the influence of women such as Bassi, the role of female scientists changed dramatically in the 18th century. In France, Émilie du Châtelet (1707 – 1749, French) translated the first and only version of Newton’s Principia Mathematica from Latin into French, adding her own commentaries and even corrections. She worked out that Newton’s equation for kinetic energy was incorrect, concluding that the energy of a moving object is proportional to the square of its velocity and not directly proportional to velocity as Newton had thought.
Another prominent female figure of the time was Caroline Herschel (1750 – 1848, German). Herschel was born in Germany and, after the death of her father, moved to England to live with her brother William Herschel. They took up astronomy as a way to pass the evenings, but together observed and discovered Uranus and two of its moons (Titania and Oberon), two moons of Saturn and some effects of infrared radiation. Caroline conducted independent research, discovered eight comets and was granted a salary for her work as William’s assistant, becoming the first woman to receive a wage for contributions towards science. Caroline also re-categorised the work of John Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, who had made observations of over 3000 stars. She presented the resulting Catalogue of Stars to the Royal Society in 1798. In 1828 she was presented with the Gold Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society, an honour that was not received by another woman until 1996. In 1835, she and the Scottish astronomer Mary Somerville (1780 – 1872) became the first female members of the Society.
During the 1800s, huge developments were made in all areas of science. Perhaps the most important of these advances was in the study of energy and its conservation. Theorists including Lord Kelvin (1824 – 1907, British) and John Prescott Joule (1818 – 1889, English) first discovered the relationship between heat and mechanical work and began to state the Laws of Thermodynamics. This influenced engineers such as Émile Clapeyron (1799 – 1864, French) and Nicolas Carnot (1796 – 1832, French) to build machines which exploited the new theories and set limits on the efficiency of energy production. Rudolf Clausius (1822 -1888, German) and Ludwig Boltzmann (1844 – 1906, Austrian) refined the laws of thermodynamics and introduced the idea of entropy whilst James Clerk Maxwell (1831 – 1879, Scottish) linked thermodynamics with the beginnings of electromagnetism. Heinrich Rudolf Hertz (1857 – 1894, German) developed Maxwell’s ideas and was the first to prove the existence of electromagnetic radiation. In this area, scientists such as André-Marie Ampère (1775 – 1836, French), Michael Faraday (1791 – 1867, English) and Hans Christian Ørsted (1777 – 1851, Danish) were among the first to discover and investigate how electric fields and magnetic fields are related. These theories of electromagnetism linked in with new developments in optics. Scientists including Thomas Young (1773 – 1829, English), Siméon Poisson (1781 – 1840, French) and Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788 – 1827, French) worked on the wave theory of light and used the mathematics of scholars such as Joseph Fourier (1768 – 1830, French) to describe their findings.
Education for women in Europe improved greatly in the 19th century as co-educational schools were set up in the UK and primary education was made free and compulsory for all. In the United States, however, there was more progress on the subject of female education with women’s colleges being set up by Emma Willard (1787 – 1870) and Catharine Beecher (1800 – 1878).
There were many influential female scholars in Europe during the 1800s, but a few of the most important physicists included Marie-Sophie Germain (1776 – 1831, French), Sofia Kovalevskaya (1850 – 1891, Russian), Hertha Ayrton (1854 – 1923, English) and Ada Lovelace (1815 – 1852, English). These women all fought hard for their right to an education and to publish their work.
Germain was a mathematician who worked on number theory, elasticity theory and differential geometry, and who also did important work on Fermat’s Last Theorem. She secretly attended the École Polytechnique near Paris, writing under a pseudonym to request lecture notes and submit written work, but was discovered and supported by Lagrange who became her mentor.[9]
Sofia Kovalevskaya could not receive a university education in her native Russia, nor could she study abroad without permission from her father or husband. Since she was not married and could not gain support from her father, she created a fictitious marriage to be able to study at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. After two years there, she moved to Berlin where she had to take private classes, as she was not allowed to study at the university. Nevertheless, in 1874 she presented three papers to the University of Göttingen to receive her title as professor of mathematics, becoming the first woman in Europe to do so.
Ada Lovelace was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron and used her powerful connections to befriend Charles Babbage. She worked on the analytical engine, a type of early computer used for solving algorithms, designed by Babbage, and her notes on the machine include what is considered to be the first algorithm intended to be solved by a computer. She is generally thought of as ‘the world’s first computer programmer’.
In the 20th and 21st century, there have been too many discoveries and influential scientists to name individually. The development of quantum mechanics in the 20th century took place between Europe and America, meaning that Europe was no longer the world centre of scientific knowledge. The two world wars during the 1900s meant that much physics research was directed towards developing new weapons, most notably the atomic bomb during the 1940s. Also during the wars however, as men were sent to the frontlines, more women were needed as engineers and in other professions requiring knowledge of physics, which provided opportunities for education.[10]
During these two centuries, more and more European women have attended university and taught Physics, as well as holding important positions in the physics community. For example, in 2008, Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born 1943, British) became the first female president of the Institute of Physics. There were also the earlier contributions of Lise Meitner (1878 – 1968, Austrian) who discovered nuclear fission, Rosalind Franklin (1920 – 1958, British) who worked on X-ray crystallography and Marie Curie (1867 – 1934, Polish) who became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 for her work on radioactivity.
In more recent times in Europe there has been an increase in women’s education. Research conducted in 2009 by the European Commission found that overall, there were more women attending and graduating universities in Europe than men (55% of students and 58% of graduates were female in 2009), but also that men were still dominating at PhD level and as academic staff. In science and engineering, however, this level was significantly lower, (31% female students and 22% female academic staff) proving that women even in the 21st century, women are still at a disadvantage in the field of science.[11]
This is particularly relevant to European citizens at the moment, with the exciting research into particle physics currently being undertaken at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. Established in July 1953, CERN brought together twelve member states within Europe: Belgium, Denmark, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Yugoslavia. Since its founding, five Nobel Prizes have been won by scientists working in its laboratories, and many new and vital technologies have been developed by teams working at the centre. These range from new particle detectors to technologies which have been adapted for use in medical imaging and diagnosis; however, arguably the most important invention to take place at the centre came in 1989, when a scientist called Tim Berners-Lee found a solution to the problem of keeping in touch with a team of around 8000 researchers from over 60 countries worldwide. His groundbreaking idea was known as the World Wide Web, and is now used by billions of people all over the planet every day.[12] As one of the world’s leading centres of research in Physics, CERN attracts scientists from all over the globe, and the diversity of its staff is undoubtedly one of the most important factors in its success. This said, only about 17% of the people working at the centre are women, and this number has never risen above 23%.[13]
There are many support groups for women studying or working in science; WiSET (Women in Science and Technology) and Women in Science, Engineering and Technology (SET), part of the Science and Technology Research Council, amongst others are helping women to break the institutional barriers that they face, and to mobilise and network female scientists.
The reasons for the gender gap in science are much discussed, and range from careers being put on hold in order to start a family, to a lack of female role models, but as is clear from taking a look back through history, there is an impressive array of inspiring female scientists, whose successes will hopefully help unlock the potential talent in female students around the world today and in the future.
[1] Kersey, Ethel M (1989) Women Philosophers: A bio-Critical Source Book. Connecticut: Greenwood Press. Ch. 90.
[2] Themistius, Orations, 23. and Diogenes Laërtius, iii. 46.
[3] Grant, Edward. (1974) A Source Book in Medieval Science. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, pg. 48.
[4] Verger, Jacques (1992): A History of the University in Europe. Vol. I: Universities in the Middle Ages, Cambridge University Press, pgs. 35–76 (62–65)
[1] Westfall, Richard S. The Construction of Modern Science, New York: John Wiley and Sons pgs 17-21
[2] Rolt, L. T. C., and Allen, J. S. (1997). The Steam Engine of Thomas Newcomen. Ashbourne, UK: Landmark Publishing.
[3] V E Thoren, Tycho and Kepler on the Lunar theory, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, vol.79 (1967), pgs. 482-489.
[4] Alic, Margaret (1986). Hypatia’s Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity to the late Nineteenth Century. Beacon Press.
[5] Schiebinger, Londa (1989). The Mind Has No Sex?: Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Harvard University Press. pgs. 21–38.
[6] Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). “Elena Lucrezia Piscopia Cornaro”. Catholic Encyclopaedia. Robert Appleton Company.
[7] Howard S. (2006), The Hidden Giants, ch. 2, Lulu.com.
[8] Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). “Bassi, Laura Maria Caterina”. Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
[9] Ogilvie, Marilyn (1986), Women in Science: Antiquity through Nineteenth Century: A Biographical Dictionary with Annotated Bibliography. MIT Press, pg 201.
[10] Götschel, Helene (2011) The Entanglement of Gender and Physics, Science Studies, Vol.24 No. 1, pg 68
[11] European Commission Stastistics 2009, She Figures 2009: Statistics and Indicators on Gender Equality in Science.
[13] Personnel Statistics, March 2011, CERN: http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/1352668/files/CERN-HR-STAFF-STAT-2010.pdf
[14] O. Skovsmose, P. Valeroand and O. R. Christensen (2009), University Science and Mathematics in Transition; 5: Cultural Models of Physics, Springer Publishers, pg 117.
Bibliography / Further Reading:
- Bruno, Leonard C. (1989), The Landmarks of Science.
- Westfall, Richard S. The Construction of Modern Science, New York: John Wiley and Sons.
- Byers, Nina and Gary Williams, ed. (2006) Out of the Shadows: Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics, Cambridge University Press
- Herzenberg, Caroline L. 1986. Women Scientists from Antiquity to the Present Locust Hill Press
- Marilyn Ogilvie (1986), Women in Science: Antiquity through Nineteenth Century: A Biographical Dictionary with Annotated Bibliography. MIT Press
- Marianne Johansen (2007), Power and Prejudice: Women in Physics, CERN Courier
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