Tag: Women in Science

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My Beginning

I spent part of this past weekend with the leadership team of the Women’s Impact Network, a group of Worcester Polytechnic Institute alumnae and friends committed to elevating the impact of women before, during, and after their time at WPI. It was a remarkable weekend filled with passionate conversations, deep thinking, and exciting plans. I left inspired, as I always am, by the women who drive this organization and its work. And I’ve been thinking since about a conversation I’ve had so many times in the past ten years or so. It always starts something like this:

Him or Her: “You went to an engineering college?”

Me: “Yep. Worcester Polytechnic Institute. WPI for short.”

Him or Her: “Go figure. I mean, you write children’s books. Do you wish you could go back and choose college all over again?”

These folks seem to think that attending WPI was a mistake for me, since I went on to make a career in words. Nothing could be further from the truth. As proof (you know how we scientists love to cite evidence) I offer this snapshot of my Sufficiency, a humanities requirement for all WPI undergraduates. I was twenty years old when I submitted ‘Realism in Contemporary Children’s Literature.’ In it I wrote that we humans face “menaces and cruelties” in abundance, but as a society “have chosen not to ignore these atrocities, but to deal with them—maybe even begin to rectify them—by helping our children to grow up understanding these darker aspects of our world through the literature we give to them as they grow.”

My STEM education at WPI was not a misstep. It was the beginning.

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Malarkey and Sparkle

“I suppose the suggestion was bound to come up sooner or later that women should be put up for the Royal Society, and once that is accepted I don’t think you could find a woman candidate more likely than Mrs. Lonsdale to be successful. I should put her at quite the best woman scientist that I know—but that probably is as far as I am prepared to go, because I must confess that I am one of those people that still maintain that there is a creative spark in the male that is absent from women, even though the latter do so often such marvelously conscientious and thorough work after the spark has been struck.”

~Dr. William Astbury in a 1943 letter to a male colleague¹

 

Friends, I have no words.

Okay, that’s not true. I have words. Here are a few of them …

I’m currently writing about scientists working in the 1940s and 1950s, so am constantly searching for context. What was it like for women to work in science then? What was it like for men? Astbury’s quote gives me that context in a way that several years of reading and research had yet to manage. The most shocking part of his words, for me, is that from all my research so far, Astbury appears to have been a decent guy. He was an excellent scientist, and supportive of his female colleagues. He worked with women (he trained in the same lab as Lonsdale) and later welcomed them into his own lab, where he trained them, from what I can tell, the same way he trained his male students. That he privately believed these women to be mere lackeys is hard to wrap my head around.

I spent my twenties as a working scientist, many of those years in a lab predominantly staffed with smart, hard-working and gifted female scientists. These women are currently training a new generation of scientists, teaching high school students, running consulting firms, strengthening our K-12 and university science education policies, writing children’s science books (!), and practicing intellectual property law. Personally, I think the combined creative sparkle is blinding. But how would our careers have fared if we’d each been born a half-century earlier? Are there people that still think the way Astbury did? How about this guy? Or this one?

It’s a lot to think about.

In 1945, Dr. Kathleen Yardsley Lonsdale and Dr. Marjory Stephenson were elected Fellows of the Royal Society. They were the first two women to ever receive that honor. They knew Astbury’s beliefs were malarkey. So do these scientists². And so do I.

So, on we go.

¹ Kersten T. Hall. The Man in the Monkeynut Coat: William Astbury and the Forgotten Road to the Double-Helix. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, page 96.

² To see a complete list of the women Fellows of the Royal Society, click the link provided here, then click “Show Filters” and then click “Gender” and then select “Female.” Boom.