From left to right (Authors): Marta Fernández Díaz lab technician, Paula Alonso-Ramos PhD student and Laura Salmón Gómez master student
For years women’s role at society have been to be a good wife and a good mother. Women could not develop their intellectual potential. Today, we want to remember all women that fight against that injustice and talk about how nowadays, it is still difficult to be a woman in science.
As an example, most of us working with microorganism commonly use agar plates in our daily research tasks. Perhaps, you might have listened to the story about a wife that gave her husband a bottle with agar to help him growing his microorganisms. That woman was Fanny Hesse. She worked as technician for her husband and Robert Koch, and she applied her cooking knowledge to science, but no one gave her the credit she deserved. So thanks to Fanny Hesse we can grow yeast in agar plates. Another problem that scientists working with microorganism used to face in the lab was isolating individual bacterial, or yeast, colonies to obtain reproducible results, since each colony very often presented different properties to others in the same Petri dish. This problem was solved by Esther Lederberg. She developed the replica plating technique for bacteria. There are many other women that contributed to biology, like Barbara McClintock, whose work in cytogenetics in maize and fungi brought light into recombination of the DNA, transposable elements, and how the chromosomes and nucleolus are organized in the cell; or Marianne Gruberg who worked with Severo Ochoa and discovered the RNA-polymerase. Nowadays, thanks to all these women who fought before us, we can develop our interest in science.
We have learnt much about important contributions from male scientists to science, like Watson and Crick, Einstein, Darwin or Ramón y Cajal. But, among all those men there are very few women who are mentioned in the text books. Examples are Marie Curie or Rosalind Franklin. Not only that their contributions have been overlooked, but in many occasions, men took all the credit despite that the important very first step in the discovery was made by a female scientist.
Besides that, we have to stand with comments such as that we are not good for science and that this is the reason why there are few women as scientists. Or that we have to take care of cleaning the laboratory because we already have experience in it. To make things worse, often women endure different degrees of sexual harassment while working in the lab.
All these injustices and lack of recognition are represented in the graphs below in the data of women scientists where it can be observed that early in the scientific career, the numbers of women and men are similar, but as the career progresses into more senior stages, the number of female researchers decrease at leadership positions while they get populated by men.
Without science there is no future and without women in science neither.
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