Women have been written out of science history – it's time to put them back

Astronomer Caroline Herschel portrayed making tea for her more famous brother, William. Wellcome Collection, CC BY-SA

By Claire Jones


One reason women tend to be absent from narratives of science is because it’s not as easy to find female scientists on the public record. Even today, the numbers of women entering science remain below those of men, especially in certain disciplines. A-level figures show only 12% of candidates in computing and 22% in physics in 2018 were girls.



The 19th-century astronomer, Caroline Herschel, languishes in the shadow of her brother William. Physicist Lise Meitner missed out on the 1944 Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission, which went to her junior collaborator, Otto Hahn, instead. Even Curie was attacked in the press for supposedly taking credit for her husband’s Pierre work.

The historian Margaret Rossiter has dubbed this systematic bias against women the “Matthew Matilda Effect”. Before the 20th century, women’s social position meant the only way they could typically negotiate access to science was to collaborate with male family members or friends and then mostly only if they were rich. This left them prey to the traditional hierarchical assumption of woman as supporter and helper to man.





Shut out


Yet, scientific women worked though the cracks. Between 1880 and 1914, some 60 women contributed papers to Royal Society publications. And some women continued to work as scientists without pay or titles. Dorothea Bate was a distinguished palaeontologist who was associated with the Natural History Museum from 1898 yet wasn’t paid or made a member of staff until 1948 when she was in her late sixties.

Why this pervasive ambivalence to female scientists? In the late 19th century, science taught that there were innate intellectual differences between the sexes which limited women’s suitability for science. (Another reason why scientific societies did not want their prestige tarnished by female fellows.) Charles Darwin argued that evolutionary competition led to the higher development of male brains.




This article was written by Claire Jones, Senior Lecturer in History of Science, University of Liverpool and was originally published on The Conversation

Read the original article here.

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