Women in STEM
Women are still underrepresented in STEM fields
A guest blog post from Meriem Allani (Horizons 2024 Alumni & CATALYST Mentor)
This blog post aims to celebrate the achievements of women in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) - women who despite intellectual brilliance and creative innovation, are not credited for their successes, in many cases being overlooked and neglected by the scientific community and wider society because of their gender.
For as long as societies have existed, women have had to fight for equal rights, for equal pay, and to be afforded the same opportunities as men. It is a similar story in the branches of STEM, despite the now obvious observation that qualities such as ingenuity, creativity, and intelligence are not defined by or dependent on gender. The logical conclusion as to why women have been so previously unrepresented and credited in this field must be that extrinsic societal factors are the limiting factor. The list of women whose lives bare evidence to this historical trend is overwhelming: Hedy Lamarr, Alice Ball, Marion Donovan ,Vera Rubin, Margaret Knight, Dr. Grace Murray Hopper, Ada Harris, Esther Lederberg, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Shiung Wu, Ada Lovelace, Lise Meitner, The ENIAC Programmers, Katherine Johnson, Mary Anderson, Nettie Stevens, Dr. Marie Maynard Daly, Dr. Alice Ball, Dr. St. Elmo Brady, Fatima al-Fihri,Maryam Mirzakhani, Mary Anning, Dr. Anna Mani, Lalitha Chandrasekhar, Dr. Karen H. L. Golder, Agnes M. Moreton; and the list goes on.
Lise Meitner - one of the most significant physicists of the 20th century
From the ancient sands of Morocco to the labs of modern America, across continents and centuries, women, often unnamed, often unheard, have contributed to humanities discoveries of the laws of nature that underpin our understanding of scientific principles - their brilliance borrowed, the light of their stars missing from the picture of the night sky. Of the more well-known examples is the story Rosalind Franklin - a chemist, molecular biologist and crystallographer.
Rosalind Franklin has only recently been credited and celebrated for her that contributed to the understanding of the double helical structure of DNA, using X-ray crystallography. By the time of her death in 1958 (some five years after her discovery), she had not been rewarded with the Nobel Prize. Born on 25 July 1920 in Notting Hill, London, into a wealthy Jewish family, Rosalind was referred to as a brilliant student and had an exemplary academic career. At the age of 11, she was lucky enough to be accepted into a prestigious school, one of the only schools in London where physics and chemistry were taught to girls at that time. There, she demonstrated her talent for these subjects, as well as for Latin and French, which she learned to speak fluently. In the first half of the 20th century, marked by the rise of Nazism and war, Rosalind Franklin's life was influenced by these unfortunate circumstances. Her family took in young Jewish refugees fleeing Germany and Eastern Europe through the Kindertransport (German for “child transport”) rescue programme. Her father urged her to give up her university scholarship to a refugee, but this did not prevent Rosalind Franklin from enrolling at Newham College, Cambridge University, to study chemistry.
Rosalind Franklin - a visionary scientist
After the war, Rosalind Franklin travelled to France in 1947 thanks to Adrienne Weill, a refugee and former student at Pierre and Marie Curie University. In Paris, she trained in X-ray crystallography under Jacques Mering at the Central Laboratory of Chemical Services. She applied this knowledge to conduct research on coal, particularly its transformation into graphite. Returning to London in 1951, Franklin joined King's College and the Department of Biophysics. There, she put her expertise in crystallography to work in the study of DNA, collaborating with Maurice Wilkins and Raymond Gosling, a doctoral student. Thanks to her skills, she improved the X-ray diffraction technique used to analyse the structure of DNA. However, tensions quickly arose between Franklin and Wilkins, highlighting professional friction within the team. Rosalind Franklin, together with Raymond Gosling, discovered the two conformations of DNA (A and B) and took X-ray crystallography images, leading to the revelation of the double helix structure. However, her research was dismissed when Maurice Wilkins, James Watson and Francis Crick built their model of DNA, using Franklin's discoveries without her recognition. In March 1953, Franklin left King's College, and her work was only published later to support Watson and Crick's model. Due to tensions with her colleagues and her cautious stance on their model, she was excluded from the discovery. After moving to Birkbeck College, she continued her research on RNA and viruses, but her health deteriorated due to ovarian cancer, and she died in 1958 at the age of 38. In 1962, Watson, Crick and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA, but Franklin, whose work was crucial, was not recognised due to her premature death and the Nobel Prize policy of not awarding posthumous prizes.
Thus, the case of Rosalind Franklin brilliantly raises the complex issue of sexism in the scientific community of the 1950s. Although her work was fundamental to the discovery of the structure of DNA, particularly through her X-ray diffraction images, she was largely ignored by her male colleagues. Tensions with Maurice Wilkins, James Watson and Francis Crick, exacerbated by misunderstandings and power dynamics related to her status as a woman in a male-dominated field, contributed to her contribution being downplayed. Franklin, despite being at the heart of the research, did not have the opportunity to publicly claim her role, particularly when her work was used without her consent after she left King's College. This marginalisation was also evident in the lack of recognition she received in the awarding of the Nobel Prize in 1962, a prize that was awarded to her co-workers despite the importance of her discoveries. Ultimately, it is clear that institutional sexism contributed significantly to her being overlooked in the initial recognition of this major discovery. It will thus take several decades before Rosalind Franklin's contribution is finally recognised for its true value.
Women as central to research
Long relegated to the background, she is now considered an essential pioneer in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Her career serves to illustrate the obstacles that women scientists have long faced, but also the need to revisit the history of science with a more accurate and inclusive perspective. This belated recognition paves the way for a broader reflection on the place of women in research and the importance of making all contributions visible, regardless of gender.
Read Meriem’s other blog post (on the power of photography) here: Hannah Arendt and World-Building Through Photography. — CATALYST by Winchester College
