#women in stem

paxvictoriana:

Sophia Jex-Blake, MD

So, friends, it’s been a while. This is going to be a quick post to celebrate the amazing lady pictured above, a Victorian trailblazer whom you may not have heard of before but definitely should remember from now on. 

Sophia Jex-Blake, quite apart from having one of the sickest Victorian names I’ve ever come across, was the leader of the ‘Edinburgh Seven’ (the others were Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson, and  Emily Bovell). These seven women petitioned the University of Edinburgh to allow them to matriculate [i.e., to become students on a course for a degree] in medicine. At first, the uni told Jex-Blake – who initially sought to take the entrance exam alone, before enlisting the help of the others – it would be too expensive and disruptive to have to set up lessons, exams, surgery theaters, etc., for just one woman. Obviously this was an excuse to exlude Jex-Blake because of her gender, which the medical establishment deemed too sensitive and too distracting to allow into their halls. Jex-Blake called their BS, publicly calling for like-minded women via posts in The Scotsmannewspaper and thus gathering together six fellow women. The Edinburgh Seven thus studied up for the matriculation exam. As the Wiki report notes: 

Of the 152 candidates who sat the exam on 19 October 1869, five were women. Four of the women came in the top seven places. [x]

By18 November 1870, they were in.

Except, as Virginia Woolf can tell you, getting “in” isn’t the end of the struggle. Once Jex-Blake et al. had joined the program, pushback from the male-dominated students, teaching assistants, professors, and physicians made attending classes – even gettingto lectures – incredibly difficult. Not only did the university charge the womenhigher tuition fees (for the inconvenience of being women and thus necessitatingseparate courses!), but also offered them fewer scholarship opportunities to pay for their coursework. More violent reactions came from classmates and TAs: 

Sophia later wrote that it was “as if a conspiracy had been formed to make our position as uncomfortable as might be”. She catalogued the abuse: her doorbell was “wrenched off” and her nameplate damaged five times; a Catherine wheel was attached to her door; smoke was blown in their faces;filthy letters were sent; they were waylaid in quiet streets; obscenities were shouted at them in public.

Edith Pechey, in a letter to the Scotsman, also spoke of being followed in the streets and having “the foulest epithets”, such as “whore”, shouted at her. [x]

Eventually, after an actual “Servants’ Hall riot” about their attendance, the Seven got near the end of their degrees, only for the university to rule in 1873 that the women were to be rejected of their degrees and dismissed.

After that, each of the Seven decided to pursue her medical career elsewhere. Jex-Blake went to Switzerland to finish her training, then eventually – in 1877 – was recognized in Ireland (still then unified and part of the UK) as a doctor. Thus she was eligible to practice in Britain at last. 

But she didn’t just go back to any old major or country hospital. Instead, Jex-Blake(at first with Pechey and other comrades from the Edinburgh fight) founded the Edinburgh School of Medicine FOR WOMEN in 1886! For six years, their school continued to be the only one that fully admitted female students in the discipline of medicine; according to the history of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, “During the twelve years of the School’s existence,at least 80 students started courses of whom 33 completed their training there; [and] 31 completed their training elsewhere” (x). Nor were these just the same middle-class white women who had stormed the Uni of Edinburgh the previous decade:

At the start of the summer term 1888, Annie Wardlaw Jaganndham, a Hindu woman, came to Edinburgh to continue her medical studies. She was soon joined by Annie Wells, who had studied for the Certificate of Medical Practitioner at Madras University and the Grant Duff Gosha Hospital. Dr Jaganndham was the first of many newly qualified doctors to become resident medical officer in the Edinburgh Hospital for Women and Children, to be followed by other newly qualified young doctors in that position. Other doctors who had studied at the School served in more senior posts in the hospital. 

After the two women from India graduated, Dr Jex-Blake wrote a second article which was published in The Spectator in 1890. She again stressed the need for women doctors in India. Her plea was answered by Mr James Cropper who instituted a scholarship for that purpose. The first recipient was Rose Govindurajulu who had taken some medical classes in Madras and been given study leave from her post in the Mysore Hospital. Having qualified, she returned to Mysore to become Assistant Physician and later Surgeon in the Mahareenee’s Hospital. (x)

Now, any fair history of Jex-Blake has to acknowledge her reputation – especially among the women with whom she had begun this fight, and who had been the first teachers at the Edinburgh School  – as “brilliant, hot-tempered, and resourceful”in a more generous light; in a more unforgiving one, for being a tenacious tyrant. Eventually, disagreements between Jex-Blake and several of her female colleagues led them to part ways, with the Cadells setting up their own school for women in Edinburgh.

In 1894, though, these schools become moot: the University of Edinburgh finally saw the light, and began admitting women for the Faculty of Medicine. (Their tuition still wasn’t covered, and they still for a while had to attend separate lectures from the male students.) Jex-Blake’s and the others’ newer schools were no longer needed, and since they had been a financial and personal burden on Jex-Blake and the other founders from day one, the ESMW closed in 1898.

More happily, Jex-Blake lived the rest of her life with her companion, Dr. Margaret Todd, a younger woman who had graduated from Jex-Blake’s school in 1894! Not only was Todd a minorly successful novelist, but she also is credited with coining the term “ISOTOPE” (!!!), when discussing with friend and chemist Frederick Soddy his work on, well, isotopes. Soddy went on to win the Nobel Prize in chemistry (in 1921, for this very work); Todd went (obviously) unrecognized for years. She died in 1918, at age 58, after completing a detailed work on Jex-Blake’s life.

Jex-Blake herself died in 1912, age 71. As the Edinburgh alumna page dedicated to her notes, she “continued to campaign for women’s suffrage” both in Britain and in the larger empire “until her death” (x).

Reupping for International Women’s Day 2018

5 Questions for a Scientist:
Ecologist and Avian Field Biologist Allyson Jackson

“Every time I catch a bird and get to see them up close, I am reminded what an honor it is to do what I do (even though I still hate getting up before sunrise!). Now that I’m a professor, I think my favorite part is working with students and seeing them have life-changing experiences in field research, just like I did.”

Allyson is an assistant professor in environmental studies at SUNY Purchase College in New York, where she teaches courses in ecology, conservation biology, and biostatistics. She holds an undergraduate degree in biology from Juniata College in Pennsylvania, an M.S. from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and a Ph.D. from Oregon State University in Oregon. She has worked at the Tracy Aviary in Salt Lake City and as a wildlife research biologist for the Biodiversity Research Institute in Maine, researching mercury in forest songbirds.

Read her full interview here.

sciencenetlinks:

Happy Birthday, Mary Anning!

Pioneering fossil collector Mary Anning was born on this day in 1799.

Anning lived during a time when geology as a science was just developing. She lived in Lyme Regis, England, an area where fossils lay exposed in cliff faces eroded by the sea. Anning was born to a family with little money or social standing. Despite the social norms of her time, which favored upper-class men as scholars, Anning became an acknowledged leader in fossil collection and identification. Her work helped provide a basis for the key theories upon which the science of geology is based. Called the “Princess of Paleontology” by a contemporary, she sold her fossil finds to tourists and to museums and collectors all over England.

Among her discoveries were a small Ichthyosaurus discovered in 1821 and the first Plesiosaurus, unearthed in 1823. Although Anning’s work was well-respected during her life, her gender and social standing prevented her from becoming a Fellow of the Geological Society, and many of her finds were not credited to her for the historical record.

Learn more.

Image Credit: Portrait of Mary Anning with her dog Tray credited to ‘Mr. Grey’ [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Ada Lovelace Day

Ada Lovelace Day is an international celebration of the achievements of women in science, technology, engineering, math, and all related STEM fields.

The celebration is named in honor of English mathematician Augusta Ada King (1815-1852), Countess of Lovelace, known colloquially as Ada Lovelace. Lovelace, the daughter of Lord Byron, is sometimes considered the world’s first computer programmer for the algorithm she wrote for Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, one of the world’s first mechanical computers. Over the years there have been historical disagreements over the extent of Lovelace’s knowledge of the subject and the originality of the work she published in her article, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes from the Translator,“ but Babbage himself seemed to dismiss such future claims in his memoir.

Learn more.

Read the NY Times Overlooked Obit on Ada Lovelace:

A gifted mathematician who is now recognized as the first computer programmer.

Image credit: Alfred Edward Chalon [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

5 Questions for a Scientist: Glaciologist Kelly Brunt

Occupation: Associate Research Scientist
Institution: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and University of Maryland
Field:Glaciology
Focus:Remote sensing of ice shelves and icebergs

Kelly is an Associate Research Scientist with the University of Maryland and the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. She has a bachelor’s degree in Geology from Syracuse University, a master’s degree in Geology from the University of Montana, and a Ph.D. in Geophysics from the University of Chicago. She was a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, where she worked on ICESat laser altimetry data, and she is currently part of the ICESat-2 mission, which launched last Saturday, September 15, working on validation of the elevation data. On the weekends in the winter, Kelly coaches alpine ski racing at Liberty Mountain, in southern Pennsylvania.

You can follow both Kelly’s NASA and skiing activity or connect with her on Twitter (@KellyMBrunt).

1. Explain what you do in your work in one sentence (or two).

I am a glaciologist (I study ice sheets) and I am part of NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite 2 (ICESat-2) mission. I am specifically tasked with looking at the ice sheets and validating the satellite elevation data products.

2. When did you first become interested in your field?

I have always preferred the winter. Growing up in Connecticut, my extended family liked to ski together and we often took trips to Vermont. The love of winter and snow (and the cold) led me to work in places like Montana, Alaska, and even Antarctica. Working in these places, and wanting to know more about ice, drove me to go back to school for a Ph.D. in geophysics, with an emphasis in glaciology.

Full interview here.

See the rest in our series here.

Happy Birthday, Mary G. Ross!

Mary Golda Ross was the first Native American woman engineer. Her work at Lockheed and NASA included developing the Agena rockets, designing concepts for flights to Mars and Venus, and creating operational requirements for spacecraft.

Learn about her life and work from the Smithsonian article, This Little-Known Math Genius Helped America Reach the Stars:

After graduating from Northeastern State College with a math degree, she decided to put her skills to work on behalf of other Native Americans, working first as a statistician for the Bureau of Indian Affairs and then at a Native American boarding school in New Mexico.

Math always called Ross’s name, and in 1942, armed with a master’s degree, she joined Lockheed Aircraft Corporation. As World War II raged, the company was working on new military aircraft. Ross helped them troubleshoot the P-38 Lightning, a fighter plane that came close to breaking the sound barrier and that engineers worried would collapse during dives. (Thanks to the work of Ross and her fellow mathematicians and engineers, Lockheed eventually realized that their fears were unfounded.)

After the war ended, Lockheed sent Ross to UCLA to earn a classification in aeronautical engineering and slowly, she began to progress through the company’s male-dominated ranks. “She worked with a lot of guys with slide rules and pocket protectors,” says Jeff Rhodes, Lockheed Martin’s historian and the editor of Code One magazine. “The stereotype was real.”

Women had always been a part of Lockheed Martin, says Rhodes. Nonetheless, when Ross was recruited to join Skunk Works, the company’s then-top-secret think tank, she was the only woman aside from the secretary.

Image Credits: 

1. Mary G. Ross from Beyond Curie by Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya
2. Mary G. Ross Google Doodle
   
3. Ad Astra per Astra by America Meredith, depicting Mary Gold Ross. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. 

Happy 200th Birthday, Maria Mitchell!

Maria Mitchell, the first professional American woman astronomer, was born on this day in 1818 in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Mitchell was also the first woman member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, two years after its formation, in 1850.

Mitchell was born to Quaker parents who believed in the education of all of their ten children, regardless of gender. Mitchell received a formal education, as well as learning from her father, who was a schoolteacher, banker, and astronomer. He also helped to maintain chronometers, a timepiece sailors used to measure longitude based on time and celestial navigation, for the local whaling fleet. His daughter would assist him in doing astronomical observations and later was trusted to complete them on her own.

In 1835, at the age of 17, Mitchell founded her own elementary school, which was open to girls regardless of race. The following year, Mitchell left the school to take a job at the Nantucket Athaneum, then a private, but affordable, library. She remained at the Athaneum until 1856.

On Oct. 1, 1847, Mitchell was using a two-inch telescope on a Nantucket rooftop when she noticed a blurry object that did not appear on her star charts. This turned out to be a comet, which became known as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” and later C/1847 T1. She became the third woman, after two 18th-century German astronomers—Caroline Herschel and Maria Margarethe Kirch—to discover a comet. King Frederick VI of Denmark, who had offered a prize for the discovery of new comets, awarded Mitchell a medal. She also became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences because of her discovery.

In 1865, Mitchell was the first person invited to join the faculty of the newly established Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She accepted the founder’s invitation, in part because it came with the promise of an observatory outfitted with a 12-inch telescope, then the second largest in the country. She went on to become a beloved professor, teaching more than 20 years and nurturing her students’ abilities as researchers in their own right. Her students did independent, original research and even engaged in field work with Mitchell’s professional peers during the solar eclipses of 1869 and 1878. Mitchell, who was involved in suffrage organizations and who served as the second president of the American Association of Women, also organized discussions and lectures for her students about women’s rights and politics.

Learn more.

Remembering Mathematician Julia Bowman Robinson

Julia Bowman Robinson, the first woman mathematician to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences, died on this day in 1985.

Robinson, who was born in 1919, is most famous for helping to answer a single math problem – Hilbert’s “Tenth Problem,” one of a series of mathematics problems posed at the Second International Congress of Mathematicians in 1900. The problem sought an effective way to determine whether an integer problem is soluble. Robinson and several other mathematicians, working separately and together, demonstrated such an algorithm cannot exist.

Robinson also spent a year working at the RAND Corporation, where, in 1951, she developed a fundamental theorem of elementary game theory.

Despite spending nearly her whole career at Berkeley, it was not until the publicity surrounding her election to the National Academy of Sciences in 1976, that her alma mater opted to offer her a tenured professorship.

Robinson was the first woman officer of the National Academy of Sciences, the first woman mathematician to receive a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (the so-called “Genius Grant”), and the first woman president of the American Mathematical Society.

Learn more.

sciencenetlinks:

Happy Birthday, Rosalind Franklin!

DNA pioneer Rosalind Franklin was born on this day in 1920.

Franklin grew up studying chemistry and physics and continued to pursue the former when she gained admission to Cambridge University over the objections of her father. She completed her undergraduate work in 1941 and her Ph.D. in physical chemistry in 1945. Her work during those war years focused on the molecular structure of coal and charcoal (or, as she put it, “the holes in coal”) under the auspices of the British Coal Utilisation Research Association. She published five papers on the topic, three of them as the sole author, and helped to spawn the study of high-strength carbon fibers.

After the war, Franklin spent several years in Paris, where she continued to hone her work in crystallography (the science of atom arrangement in solid materials). She undertook the study of X-ray crystallography, which utilizes X-rays in order to study how light is diffracted when it hits a crystal. She became quite adept at this technique, and, although her work predominantly had been within physics and chemistry to this point, when she returned to England in 1951 it was to King College’s biophysics program, where she was to examine large biological cells and, in a sudden change of plans, DNA.

It was through Franklin’s X-ray crystallography work on DNA that revelations about the structure of DNA came to light. Scientists around the world were already at work unraveling the mysteries of the biological building block, but it was an image of Franklin’s, Photograph 51 as it would be dubbed, that provided the answers to several mysteries about DNA’s double helix. Maurice Wilkins, the head of the research lab, shared this photograph, without Franklin’s knowledge, with James Watson and Francis Crick, who were working at Cambridge. The clear images allowed Watson and Crick to see where their own research had gone wrong and to correct it. They published their results of the double helix structure of DNA in Nature in 1953. Although her photograph was attributed to her (and a paper she and her graduate student wrote appeared alongside their findings), modern examinations of their work suggest that Franklin’s contributions were downplayed, although whether inadvertantly or intentionally remains a debatable point.

Franklin’s bright future was not to be fully realized, however. She died in 1958 at the age of 37 of ovarian cancer. Her death rendered her ineligible to be considered for the 1962 Nobel Prize that Crick, Watson, and Wilkins would share for their DNA findings.

Learn more.

Photo Credit: National Library of Medicine/Collection of Jenifer Glynn

To close out a wonderful Women’s History Month, we would like to introduce you to Barbara McClintock, a genetic scientist, who discovered transposons. Here’s a comic of her research which she was awarded a Nobel Prize for in 1983. 

The Researcher Who Helped Spark the Gay Rights Movement

45 years ago the American Psychiatric Association (APA) took homosexuality off the list of mental disorders. At that time, being gay was considered an illness that required psychiatric treatment.

It took decades of activism to change this — and also the work of groundbreaking researchers like UCLA psychologist Evelyn Hooker. 

Her research debunked the belief that homosexuality was a mental illness, ultimately leading to its removal from the APA’s handbook of disorders in 1973. 

Thanking her for her work, one man wrote to her, “I think you did it because you knew what love was when you saw it, and you knew that gay love was like all other love.”

DECEMBER 6 - NINA TANDON

Nina Tandon, CEO and cofounder of EpiBone, is revolutionizing medicine. Her company is the first in the world to use a patient’s stem cells to grow human bone that can then be used to repair bone defects like bone loss.

Ideally, these bones can be grown to the exact shape and size needed and are easily implanted into the body because they are made from the patient’s own cells. Tandon was named a TED senior fellow last year and she’s also one of Business Insider’s “40 under 40: People to watch in 2015.”

Text for today’s post was taken from the Business Insider piece “The 15 Most Amazing Women In Science Today”. Read even more about Nina and her company in the publication’s November 2014 profile here.

Every scientist’s journey is unique. Paleontologist Jingmai O'Connor grew up surrounded by science–her mom was also a scientist. But her fascination for Mezosoic avian dinosaurs and bird evolution was a convergence of both curiosity and heritage. 

 "This would be a way of combining my love of China and Chinese culture with paleontology, my new fascination and obsession.“ Watch her story at breakthroughfilms.org.

When paleontologist Jingmai O’Connor looks at the abdomen of a small, ancient avian fossil, she gets a thrill when she spots a jumble of nodules, no bigger than a scattering of goosebumps, protruding from the creature’s bones. Their presence could mean the animal’s metabolism supported rapid egg growth. In another specimen, O’Connor discovers an entire bird gobbled up inside of a chicken-sized feathered dinosaur, revealing a clue about the ecology in which both animals lived.

O’Connor’s obsessive eye for detail and encyclopedic knowledge of morphology comes in handy when she’s placing these fossils on the ancient family tree of birds. She credits those skills, as well as her enthusiasm for science, to her mother, a geochemist who earned her PhD while raising O’Connor and her three siblings. It was also her mother’s influence that led O’Connor to focus on geology—and to explore her own Chinese-American roots—by focusing her studies on the scores of bird fossils coming out of China at the turn of the century.

Dozens of discoveries later, O’Connor is now a professor at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology in Beijing where she uses the world’s largest collection of avian dinosaurs to explore the changes in ancient species that led to wings, tail feathers, flight, and many other adaptations seen in modern birds.