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My commentary on Marie Curie and the paucity of women chemistry Nobel laureates ends wondering
"...if what underlies the inability to fully acknowledge the social biases that obscure and downplay women’s scientific achievements, and the ways in which our spaces silently speak to us about who belongs and who doesn’t, who appears capable and who does not, is the assumption that if a Marie doesn’t make a critical breakthrough, of course, a Pierre somewhere will. Will chemistry make all the critical leaps it could, without the contribution of half of its finest minds?"
Last week, the president of Bryn Mawr College (where I teach) had an opinion piece in Inside Higher Ed about closing the gap for women in science and engineering. She, too, worries that progress in science and technology is impeded by lack of participation by women (and I would add the lack of recognition for women's work in these fields) President McAuliffe writes "As long as there is a gender gap in these fields, there will be an innovation gap."
Some readers of McAuliffe's essay had a hard time imagining that scientific progress could be impeded when women are underrepresented or sidelined in science and said so in the comments. Sam Kean's delightful Disappearing Spoon includes a clear counterexample: In 1934, Ida Noddak suggested the possibility of atomic fission. Her work was dismissed as "ill conceived and unfounded" by Emilio Segre (who won the Nobel prize in physics for the discovery of the anti-proton); Irene Joliet-Curie similarly thought it possible; Lise Meitner definitely discovered fission in 1939 (and Otto Hahn won the Nobel for the discovery).
Another example on the same theme: Lise Meitner also discovered the Auger effect, in 1922, a year before it was discovered by Pierre Auger (for whom it is named).
I realize these are historical examples, but they do prove the point. A blanket disregard (for whatever reason, be it gender, country of origin, venue for publication) for the contributions of a subset of scientists can impede the progress of science. As Matt
Thanks for this blogpost I (as a male) agree to in full. Another example would be Antoinette Brown Blackwell who discovered biases in early Darwinian works concerning the intellectual capacities and "sexes in nature", but was largely ignored for more than a century. Nowadays, colleagues such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy ("Mothers and Others") do find strong empirical support for many of her hypotheses.
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