Reading 1
FEMALE SCIENTISTS
Changing The World
In any web search for the world's famous scientists, Marie Curie always receives a mention. Curie, a Polish and naturalised French physicist and chemist, discovered radiation, helped apply it in the field of X-rays and coined the term radioactivity.
Science was man's world in the nineteenth century. And yet, Mary Anning became an expert in fossils and geology. Coming from a poor family, she collected fossils on the beach and sold them to make a little money. She found fossils of complete marine reptiles that became extinct over 100 million years ago. She gained the respect of scientists, but living in an era when women weren't allowed to vote or attend university, she was not allowed to join the Geological Society of London.
A hundred years later, conditions were still difficult for female scientists. Rosalind Franklin, a chemist born in 1920, was part of a team who discovered the molecular structure of DNA. Tragically, she died aged thirty-seven, four years before her fellow scientists, all men, were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. They made no reference to Franklin in their acceptance speech.
In cases where women's achievements were recognised, we still find evidence of discrimination in the way these were reported in the press. When the brilliant chemist Dorothy Hodgkin was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1964 for discovering the molecular structure of penicillin and vitamin B12, the paper headline was Oxford Housewife Wins Nobel. In fact, this housewife was also a professor at Oxford University. The gender gap in science is narrowing, with many female scientists inspiring girls to study it, but full equality remains a goal.
(Adapted from English Discovery 12)
