Women in Science To Know About
Science is a vastly interesting field that explains much about what we know today: how our bodies work, evolution, weather cycles, and more. While interesting and vital to how humanity lives today, it’s not exactly a balanced field of study. Science is a predominantly male-led field, with less than 30% of women making up scientific researchers worldwide. This is because women are often discouraged from (or become less interested in) entering STEM fields from a young age, blocking off many brilliant minds from science, technology, engineering, and math.
Despite gender discrimination in the field and a lack of recognition in the community, there are still countless women who have made a name for themselves in science and contributed to historical findings that help us understand the world we live in. The achievements of these women have paved the way for generations of women scientists that have yet to come.
Take Alice Ball, for example. Ball was an American chemist who was the first woman and first African American to receive a master’s degree from the University of Hawaii. At 23, Ball made a groundbreaking treatment for leprosy; prior to her discovery, the best treatment for leprosy was chaulmoogra oil, which was either difficult for patients to ingest or apply and too thick to inject. She developed an easily injectable form of the oil that would go on to save countless lives as the best leprosy treatment until the 1940s.
British chemist and DNA researcher Rosalind Franklin supposedly knew she wanted to be a scientist since she was 15 years old. She received a scholarship to King’s College London and became an expert at X-ray crystallography. Franklin’s research was the first to show the basic dimensions of DNA strands, which revealed the molecule to be two matching parts that ran in opposite directions. Her research was used by James Watson and Francis Crick for their own research on the DNA model and was published separately as supporting data alongside Watson, Crick, and Maurice Wilkins’ research articles.
Technology has seen terrific women scientists as well. Grace Hopper was a computer programmer who helped develop several computer languages; she is considered one of the first programmers in the modern computing age. Hopper obtained her master’s degree and Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale, then went on to have a successful career in the private sector and the US Navy. Throughout World War II, Hopper worked in a lab responsible for top-secret calculations for minesweeper calibrations, calculating the range of anti-aircraft guns, and checking the math for the plutonium bomb. She is also a contributor to modern computer slang; while developing the earliest electromechanical computers, Hopper dismantled a malfunctioning computer and found a dead moth inside of it. This is why we call computer problems “bugs” in the system.
