Essay Series 3.1: Women’s contributions to the physical sciences have been ignored, minimized, dismissed, erased, or stolen.

As a student, I heard little about the scientific accomplishments of women, with the exception of Marie Curie, who explored radiation, among other topics, and gained two Nobel prizes—one in physics and the other in chemistry. She remains the only person to have two Nobel prizes in different sciences. As a middle-aged adult, I was entranced with physics, particularly quantum mechanics. In my readings about physics and astronomy, I only found information about men’s work. My experience isn’t unusual; many women in the sciences are largely invisible to the general public, as several national polls in Canada and the United States have documented.¹³³

An author, who is also a physicist, reports that when she asked other scientists about the lack of women in the history of science, she heard myths like women are best suited for the nurturing sciences and lack confidence, drive, and energy. She also heard that women don’t have the technical skills or aren’t smart enough for certain sciences.¹³⁴

Two books cited in this essay^135,136 report that women have long had trouble gaining access to education or jobs equal to their knowledge and skills. In addition, men often took ownership of their accomplishments or didn’t acknowledge their contributions. Below are some examples of obstacles women scientists have faced.

Harriet Brooks

Brooks was one of the first women to earn a graduate degree at McGill University in 1901 and the first Canadian woman to become a nuclear physicist. McGill admitted women to degree programs because Donald A. Smith, a prominent businessman, gave an endowment in 1884 to the university to support women’s education. Ernest Rutherford, a Nobel-prize-winning scientist, invited Brooks to be his graduate student. Brooks, between 1898 and 1904, studied the element radon, measured its half-life, and discovered other fundamental properties of radioactivity. Barnard College hired Brooks to teach physics. When Brooks informed the Dean of the college that she was getting engaged, the Dean told her she couldn’t work at Barnard if she got married. The Dean was a woman who told another woman she couldn’t be married and work at a woman’s college. The Dean said that Barnard College’s reputation would suffer if it had a married woman on its staff and that a woman’s place was in the home. Brooks eventually left the world of physics. Rutherford and another man drew on Brooks’ work to develop a model of radioactive decay, published a paper on it, and received Nobel Prizes. History has dismissed Brooks’ contributions to their work.¹³⁷

Wu Chien-Shiung

Wu’s father and other family encouraged her to achieve a high level of education in China. She eventually moved to the United States and graduated in 1940 with a PhD in physics from the University of California at Berkeley. Although the university recognized Wu’s brilliance and hard work, it didn’t hire her because she was a woman. Later, Wu worked at Columbia University and on the Manhattan Project.¹³⁸

Wu made a number of breakthroughs in physics. Her work assisted in purifying uranium and accurately measuring radioactivity. Wu also provided important experimental evidence that photons can be connected or “entangled” even if separated by long distances.¹³⁹

In 1957, a Nobel Prize committee failed to recognize Wu’s contributions to a breakthrough in physics. Two men won the Nobel Prize for theorizing that identical particles don't always behave identically — a breakthrough that overturned a fundamental assumption in physics. Wu did the difficult experiment that proved their theory correct. The Nobel committee excluded Wu. However, both men acknowledged Wu's work in their speeches accepting the Nobel Prize.¹⁴⁰

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967, which was a breakthrough in astrophysics. Her advisor, who was a man, received a Nobel Prize for her discovery in 1974. About 50 years later, in 2018, Bell Burnell received a Special Breakthrough Prize in physics for her 1967 discovery. She donated her $3 million in prize money to advancing women in physics.¹⁴¹

Megan Urry

Urry is an astrophysicist with a stellar career. When she was a senior leader at the institute that operated the Hubble Space Telescope for NASA,¹⁴² she realized that the few women on the team were more successful by several measures, yet were paid less than the men on the team. When she raised these inequities at the institute, the men didn’t believe there was a problem. After that, she became the first tenured woman professor in the physics department at Yale and then the Chair of the Yale Physics Department from 2007 to 2013. She is now the Director of Yale’s Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. Even so, rumors spread that there must be some graduate student man who was responsible for some of the work she did herself.¹⁴³

Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier

Doudna and Charpentier determined how to cut out specific pieces of DNA and replace them with another piece. This technique is called CRISPR, and it has applications related to treating genetic diseases and improving agriculture. These scientists have won a number of prestigious scientific prizes, including the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2020. However, a competing research team led by men is disputing ownership of the patent on the women's work.¹⁴⁴

The stories I recount above demonstrate that fundamental and transformative knowledge about astronomy, physics, and gene-editing technology rests on the insights and discoveries of women scientists.^145,146 These scientific fields are among the most intellectually demanding.

Reflections

One of the consequences of erasing women’s scientific breakthroughs is that people have few women scientists as role models. So everyone risks dismissing the brilliance of women in the sciences and assuming that they are inferior to men.

Everyone suffers from the erasure of women’s achievements. We need an educational system that gives women’s accomplishments the same recognition as men’s. This would help attract more brilliant women to a range of scientific disciplines and enrich our knowledge of the world.

Unfortunately, some men still try to take credit for women’s scientific work.¹⁴⁷ However, other men work to support and promote women’s accomplishments, such as Donald A. Smith in the 1880s. We need more men like him.

During my career, I became aware of instances where people appropriated others’ innovative ideas. I didn’t do anything about this because I felt career damage would result. However, I now question my own responses to these situations. Perhaps private conversations with the people involved could have helped.

Were you aware of women’s accomplishments growing up? How did what you knew at the time affect your studies or career goals?

Have you experienced appropriation of your work? If so, how did you respond?