OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, MARCH 2018When Marie Skłodowska Curie embarked on a fund-raising tour of the United States in 1921, she was amazed to see female students being taught alongside the men. In Curie’s adopted home country of France, married women belonged to their husbands and were not allowed to earn money in their own right. In the U.S., many thousands of independent American women greeted her with rapturous applause, lavishly donating the equivalent of more than $1 million to buy a whole gram of radium for her research institute in Paris. Yet despite their relative liberation, American women by and large regarded Curie as exceptional, too extraordinary to provide a realistic role model.
One of Curie’s closest friends was Hertha Ayrton, an English physicist and militant suffragette. She had won a Royal Society medal for her groundbreaking research into electric lighting, but was turned down for membership of the Society on the grounds that she was married. Defiantly, Ayrton told a journalist that she did “not agree with sex being brought into science at all. The idea of ‘woman and science’ is completely irrelevant. Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not.” Brave words, but are they any truer now than then?
These days, the principle of gender equality is widely enshrined in law, but the problems of unequal numbers and unequal salaries remain unresolved. When I started writing A Lab of One’s Own: Science ...
