Women in science

The most famous of the women alchemist, Mary the Jewess, is credited with inventing several chemical instruments, including the double boiler (bain-marie); the improvement or creation of distillation equipment of that time.

According to Jackson Spielvogel, 'Male scientists used the new science to spread the view that women were by nature inferior and subordinate to men and suited to play a domestic role as nurturing mothers.

Carl Linnaeus' system of plant classification based on sexual characteristics drew attention to botanical licentiousness, and people feared that women would learn immoral lessons from nature's example.

[45] The rise of salon culture in Europe brought philosophers and their conversation to an intimate setting where men and women met to discuss contemporary political, social, and scientific topics.

[67] Marie-Anne Pierrette Paulze and her husband Antoine Lavoisier rebuilt the field of chemistry, which had its roots in alchemy and at the time was a convoluted science dominated by George Stahl's theory of phlogiston.

In 1939, in collaboration with her nephew Otto Frisch, Meitner derived the theoretical explanation for an experiment performed by Hahn and Fritz Strassman in Berlin, thereby demonstrating the occurrence of nuclear fission.

[106][107] Wu would later also confirm Albert Einstein's EPR Paradox in the first experimental corroboration, and prove the first violation of Parity and Charge Conjugate Symmetry, thereby laying the conceptual basis for the future Standard model of Particle Physics, and the rapid development of the new field.

"[110]: 33–34 A recent book titled Athena Unbound provides a life-course analysis (based on interviews and surveys) of women in science from early childhood interest, through university, graduate school and the academic workplace.

South-African born physicist and radiobiologist Tikvah Alper(1909–95), working in the UK, developed many fundamental insights into biological mechanisms, including the (negative) discovery that the infective agent in scrapie could not be a virus or other eukaryotic structure.

French virologist Françoise Barré-Sinoussi performed some of the fundamental work in the identification of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) as the cause of AIDS, for which she shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

[112] Irène Joliot-Curie, daughter of Marie Curie, won the 1935 Nobel Prize for chemistry with her husband Frédéric Joliot for their work in radioactive isotopes leading to nuclear fission.

Carol Greider and the Australian born Elizabeth Blackburn, along with Jack W. Szostak, received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.

A 2018 review of the Royal Society of Britain by historians Aileen Fyfe and Camilla Mørk Røstvik produced similarly low numbers,[146] with women accounting for more than 25% of members in only a handful of countries, including Cuba, Panama and South Africa.

Of the 13 sub-Saharan countries reporting data, seven have observed substantial increases (more than 5%) in women engineers since 2000, namely: Benin, Burundi, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Madagascar, Mozambique and Namibia.

In the United Arab Emirates, the government has made it a priority to develop a knowledge economy, having recognized the need for a strong human resource base in science, technology and engineering.

[153] During her testimony, Cobb said:[151]I find it a little ridiculous when I read in a newspaper that there is a place called Chimp College in New Mexico where they are training chimpanzees for space flight, one a female named Glenda.

Recent data on women's participation in industrial research are available for those countries with the most developed national innovation systems, with the exception of Brazil and Cuba: Uruguay (47%), Argentina (29%), Colombia and Chile (26%).

The Caribbean paints a similar picture, with women graduates in science being on a par with men or dominating this field in Barbados, Cuba, Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago.

[141] Most countries in Eastern Europe, West and Central Asia have attained gender parity in research (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia and Ukraine) or are on the brink of doing so (Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan).

In the former Soviet states, women are also very present in the business enterprise sector: Bosnia and Herzegovina (59%), Azerbaijan (57%), Kazakhstan (50%), Mongolia (48%), Latvia (48%), Serbia (46%), Croatia and Bulgaria (43%), Ukraine and Uzbekistan (40%), Romania and Montenegro (38%), Belarus (37%), Russian Federation (37%).

Kim and Moon (2011) remark on the tendency of Korean women to withdraw from the labour force to take care of children and assume family responsibilities, calling it a 'domestic brain drain'.

The country with the lowest participation of female researchers is Saudi Arabia, even though they make up the majority of tertiary graduates, but the figure of 1.4% covers only the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology.

[141] Of note is that women account for a relatively high proportion of researchers employed in the business enterprise sector in South Africa (35%), Kenya (34%), Botswana and Namibia (33%) and Zambia (31%).

Historically, women who have accepted STEM research positions for the government or the military remained in the closet due to lack of federal protections or the fact that homosexual or gender nonconforming expression was criminalized in their country.

[167] In a nationwide study of LGBTQA employees in STEM fields in the United States, same-sex attracted and gender nonconforming women in engineering, earth sciences, and mathematics reported that they were less likely to be out in the workplace.

[183][184] Creative Resilience: Art by Women in Science is a multi–media exhibition and accompanying publication, produced in 2021 by the Gender Section of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

This was seen in a 2007 meta-analysis conducted by Jocelyn Steinke and colleagues from Western Michigan University where, after engaging elementary school students in a Draw-a-Scientist Test, out of 4,000 participants only 28 girls drew female scientists.

[195] In April 2015 Williams and Ceci published a set of five national experiments showing that hypothetical female applicants were favored by faculty for assistant professorships over identically qualified men by a ratio of 2 to 1.

[196] In 2014, a controversy over the depiction of pinup women on Rosetta project scientist Matt Taylor's shirt during a press conference raised questions of sexism within the European Space Agency.

In January 2005, Harvard University President Lawrence Summers sparked controversy at a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce.