Human society is diverse and we should celebrate and treasure the strength in this quality. When you don't have diversity in the creative process, you inevitably end up with a single, narrow, distorted perspective that hinders progress.
While Aristotle answered the question 'What is the immediate source of the design that we see in living things?' correctly with 'It is the information that they inherit from their parents', there is much that he did not understand. For example, he thought that women were 'deficient' and a departure from the male, and believed that they had fewer teeth than men. But while attitudes to women have changed a great deal, in science as in other areas, women still struggle for the recognition they deserve.
In the world of science, the achievements of women scientists are often not acknowledged, and are instead attributed to male colleagues. This has been named the 'Matilda effect' after the 19th century suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage.
This is a problem with our culture, not with science. No major international exhibition of contemporary art has ever achieved gender parity, and it is telling how few women have been thought of as great artists throughout Western history.
Nettie Maria Stevens at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania overturned the idea that the environment was important in determining the sex of a child, when she demonstrated that the X and Y chromosomes are responsible. Her colleague and mentor Edmund Wilson is more commonly cited as the discoverer. Though when she died of breast cancer in 1912, the journal Science referred to her worldwide reputation.
In late 1950's France, the credit for Marthe Gautier's work on the discovery of Down syndrome went instead to a male colleague, Jerome Lejeune.
Marie Sklodowska Curie, of Polish origin but who had to conduct her research in Paris, became the first women to win the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. In 1910 she lost the vote over her nomination as a member of the French Academie des Sciences. The following year she won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, becoming the only person to win the award in two different sciences. The Academie only elected its first female full member in 1979, the mathematician Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat.
In the US, Esther Lederberg deserved more credit for her work in bacterial genetics, including the discovery of a virus that infects bacteria, but was given a shared Nobel prize in 1958 with her husband Joshua Lederberg. Esther was more adept at experimental work than Joshua. A major pioneer of bacterial genetics, Esther discovered the lamda phage, which is widely used to study gene regulation and genetic recombination. She also invented the replica plating technique, which is used to isolate and analyse bacterial mutants and track antibiotic resistance. This work was crucial to Joshua's research.
At the John Hopkins University, Baltimore, US, graduate student Candace Pert helped discover the opiate receptor (the cellular binding site for the body's own painkillers, endorphins, in the brain) and famously protested when only men went on the share the Nobel Prize for this work.
Who knows how different our world would be if pioneers such as Hilde Mangold and Rosalind Franklin had not died so tragically young? It is tempting to think that fertility science would have become more focused on making reproduction easier and more comfortable for women. But we all know that if Mangold and Franklin and other remarkable women like them had lived to an old age, it is doubtful if the dial would have turned much from male control to female empowerment.
Hilde Mangold (1898-1924) was a German embryologist best known for her 1923 dissertation which demonstrated embryonic induction, the capacity of cells to direct the developmental trajectory of other cells. This work was the foundation for her mentor, Hans Spemann's 1935 Nobel Prize for Medicine for the discovery of the embryonic organizer, and remains a fundamental concept and area of ongoing research in the field. Her dissertation is one of the very few doctoral theses in biology that have directly resulting in the awarding of a Nobel Prize.
Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) was an English chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal and graphite. She is best known for her work on X-ray diffraction images of of DNA which led to the discovery of the DNA double helix - for which Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins shared the Nobel Prize in Phsiology or Medicine in 1962. Watson suggested she receive a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, but the Nobel Committee did not usually make posthumous awards, and are not currently permitted. (If a person is awarded a prize, but dies before receiving it, the prize is still presented.)
The fact is that the heroic narrative of the brilliant scientist who died tragically young has been told many times when it comes to men such as Alan Turing, Srinivasa Ramanujan and Blaise Pascal. But it is only in recent years that the many talented women who died before fulfilling their potential have started to rise out of the murk of history.
In 2020 the gap still remains. A 2018 study of more than 10 million research papers concluded that women were less often in authorship positions linked with seniority. Other studies show that grant reviewers award lower scores to proposals from women. And women often still feel it intimidating to speak in public, and are less likely to ask questions after a talk.
Source: The Dance of Life: symmetry, cells and how we become human. Magdalena Zernicka-Goertz & Roger Highfield. W.H. Allen, 2020.
