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 Women  Scientists  Who  Were  Snubbed  Due  to  Sexism  

 
Despite  enormous  progress  in  recent  decades,  women  still  have  to  deal  with  biases  
against  them  in  the  sciences.  
8  Minute  Read  
By  Jane  J.  Lee,  
 
National  Geographic  
 
PUBLISHED  May  19,  2013  
 
In  April,  National  Geographic  News  published  a  story  about  the  letter  in  which  scientist  
Francis  Crick  described  DNA  to  his  12-­‐year-­‐old  son.  In  1962,  Crick  was  awarded  a  Nobel  
Prize  for  discovering  the  structure  of  DNA,  along  with  fellow  scientists  James  Watson  
and  Maurice  Wilkins.  
 
Several  people  posted  comments  about  our  story  that  noted  one  name  was  missing  from  
the  Nobel  roster:  Rosalind  Franklin,  a  British  biophysicist  who  also  studied  DNA.  Her  
data  were  critical  to  Crick  and  Watson's  work.  But  it  turns  out  that  Franklin  would  not  
have  been  eligible  for  the  prize—she  had  passed  away  four  years  before  Watson,  Crick,  
and  Wilkins  received  the  prize,  and  the  Nobel  is  never  awarded  posthumously.  
 
But  even  if  she  had  been  alive,  she  may  still  have  been  overlooked.  Like  many  women  
scientists,  Franklin  was  robbed  of  recognition  throughout  her  career  (See  her  section  
below  for  details.)  
 
She  was  not  the  first  woman  to  have  endured  indignities  in  the  male-­‐dominated  world  of  
science,  but  Franklin's  case  is  especially  egregious,  said  Ruth  Lewin  Sime,  a  retired  
chemistry  professor  at  Sacramento  City  College  who  has  written  on  women  in  science.  
 
Over  the  centuries,  female  researchers  have  had  to  work  as  "volunteer"  faculty  
members,  seen  credit  for  significant  discoveries  they've  made  assigned  to  male  
colleagues,  and  been  written  out  of  textbooks.  
 
They  typically  had  paltry  resources  and  fought  uphill  battles  to  achieve  what  they  did,  
only  "to  have  the  credit  attributed  to  their  husbands  or  male  colleagues,"  said  Anne  
Lincoln,  a  sociologist  at  Southern  Methodist  University  in  Texas,  who  studies  biases  
against  women  in  the  sciences.  
 
Today's  women  scientists  believe  that  attitudes  have  changed,  said  Laura  Hoopes  at  
Pomona  College  in  California,  who  has  written  extensively  on  women  in  the  sciences—
"until  it  hits  them  in  the  face."  Bias  against  female  scientists  is  less  overt,  but  it  has  not  
gone  away.  
 
Here  are  six  female  researchers  who  did  ground-­‐breaking  work—and  whose  names  are  
likely  unfamiliar  for  one  reason:  because  they  are  women.  
 
Jocelyn  Bell  Burnell  
 
Born  in  Northern  Ireland  in  1943,  Jocelyn  Bell  Burnell  discovered  pulsars  in  1967  while  
still  a  graduate  student  in  radio  astronomy  at  Cambridge  University  in  England.  
 
Pulsars  are  the  remnants  of  massive  stars  that  went  supernova.  Their  very  existence  
demonstrates  that  these  giants  didn't  blow  themselves  into  oblivion—instead,  they  left  
behind  small,  incredibly  dense,  rotating  stars.  
 
Bell  Burnell  discovered  the  recurring  signals  given  off  by  their  rotation  while  analyzing  
data  printed  out  on  three  miles  of  paper  from  a  radio  telescope  she  helped  assemble.  
 
The  finding  resulted  in  a  Nobel  Prize,  but  the  1974  award  in  physics  went  to  Anthony  
Hewish—Bell  Burnell's  supervisor—and  Martin  Ryle,  also  a  radio  astronomer  at  
Cambridge  University.  
 
The  snub  generated  a  "wave  of  sympathy"  for  Bell  Burnell.  But  in  an  interview  with  
National  Geographic  News  this  month,  the  astronomer  was  fairly  matter-­‐of-­‐fact.  
 
"The  picture  people  had  at  the  time  of  the  way  that  science  was  done  was  that  there  was  
a  senior  man—and  it  was  always  a  man—who  had  under  him  a  whole  load  of  minions,  
junior  staff,  who  weren't  expected  to  think,  who  were  only  expected  to  do  as  he  said,"  
explained  Bell  Burnell,  now  a  visiting  astronomy  professor  at  the  University  of  Oxford.  
 
But  despite  the  sympathy,  and  her  groundbreaking  work,  Bell  Burnell  said  she  was  still  
subject  to  the  prevailing  attitudes  toward  women  in  academia.  
 
"I  didn't  always  have  research  jobs,"  she  said.  Many  of  the  positions  the  astrophysicist  
was  offered  in  her  career  were  focused  on  teaching  or  administrative  and  management  
duties.  
 
"[And]  it  was  extremely  hard  combining  family  and  career,"  Bell  Burnell  said,  partly  
because  the  university  where  she  worked  while  pregnant  had  no  provisions  for  
maternity  leave.  
 
She  has  since  become  quite  "protective"  of  women  in  academia.  Some  individual  schools  
may  give  them  support,  but  Bell  Burnell  wants  a  systemic  approach  to  boost  the  
numbers  of  female  researchers.  
 
She  recently  chaired  a  working  group  for  the  Royal  Society  of  Edinburgh,  tasked  with  
finding  a  strategy  to  boost  the  number  of  women  in  the  fields  of  science,  technology,  
engineering,  and  math  in  Scotland.  (Learn  more  about  Bell  Burnell.)  
 
Esther  Lederberg  
 
Born  in  1922  in  the  Bronx,  Esther  Lederberg  would  grow  up  to  lay  the  groundwork  for  
future  discoveries  on  genetic  inheritance  in  bacteria,  gene  regulation,  and  genetic  
recombination.  
 
A  microbiologist,  she  is  perhaps  best  known  for  discovering  a  virus  that  infects  
bacteria—called  the  lambda  bacteriophage—in  1951,  while  at  the  University  of  
Wisconsin.  
 
Lederberg,  along  with  her  first  husband  Joshua  Lederberg,  also  developed  a  way  to  
easily  transfer  bacterial  colonies  from  one  petri  dish  to  another,  called  replica  plating,  
which  enabled  the  study  of  antibiotic  resistance.  The  Lederberg  method  is  still  in  use  
today.  
 
Joshua  Lederberg's  work  on  replica  plating  played  a  part  in  his  1958  Nobel  Prize  for  
physiology  or  medicine,  which  he  shared  with  George  Beadle  and  Edward  Tatum.  
 
"She  deserved  credit  for  the  discovery  of  lambda  phage,  her  work  on  the  F  fertility  
factor,  and,  especially,  replica  plating,"  wrote  Stanley  Falkow,  a  retired  microbiologist  at  
Stanford  University,  in  an  email.  But  she  didn't  receive  it.  
 
Lederberg  also  wasn't  treated  fairly  in  terms  of  her  academic  standing  at  Stanford,  
added  Falkow,  a  colleague  of  Lederberg's  who  spoke  at  her  memorial  service  in  2006.  
"She  had  to  fight  just  to  be  appointed  as  a  research  associate  professor,  whereas  she  
surely  should  have  been  afforded  full  professorial  rank.  She  was  not  alone.  Women  were  
treated  badly  in  academia  in  those  days."  
 
Chien-­‐Shiung  Wu  
 
Born  in  Liu  Ho,  China,  in  1912,  Chien-­‐Shiung  Wu  overturned  a  law  of  physics  and  
participated  in  the  development  of  the  atom  bomb.  
 
Wu  was  recruited  to  Columbia  University  in  the  1940s  as  part  of  the  Manhattan  Project  
and  conducted  research  on  radiation  detection  and  uranium  enrichment.  She  stayed  in  
the  United  States  after  the  war  and  became  known  as  one  of  the  best  experimental  
physicists  of  her  time,  said  Nina  Byers,  a  retired  physics  professor  at  the  University  of  
California,  Los  Angeles.  
 
In  the  mid-­‐1950s,  two  theoretical  physicists,  Tsung-­‐Dao  Lee  and  Chen  Ning  Yang,  
approached  Wu  to  help  disprove  the  law  of  parity.  The  law  holds  that  in  quantum  
mechanics,  two  physical  systems—like  atoms—that  were  mirror  images  would  behave  
in  identical  ways.  
 
Wu's  experiments  using  cobalt-­‐60,  a  radioactive  form  of  the  cobalt  metal,  upended  this  
law,  which  had  been  accepted  for  30  years.  
 
This  milestone  in  physics  led  to  a  1957  Nobel  Prize  for  Yang  and  Lee—but  not  for  Wu,  
who  was  left  out  despite  her  critical  role.  "People  found  [the  Nobel  decision]  
outrageous,"  said  Byers.  
 
Pnina  Abir-­‐Am,  a  historian  of  science  at  Brandeis  University,  agreed,  adding  that  
ethnicity  also  played  a  role.  
 
Wu  died  of  a  stroke  in  1997  in  New  York.  
  
Lise  Meitner  
 
Born  in  Vienna,  Austria,  in  1878,  Lise  Meitner's  work  in  nuclear  physics  led  to  the  
discovery  of  nuclear  fission—the  fact  that  atomic  nuclei  can  split  in  two.  That  finding  
laid  the  groundwork  for  the  atomic  bomb.  
 
Her  story  is  a  complicated  tangle  of  sexism,  politics,  and  ethnicity.  
 
After  finishing  her  doctoral  degree  in  physics  at  the  University  of  Vienna,  Meitner  moved  
to  Berlin  in  1907  and  started  collaborating  with  chemist  Otto  Hahn.  They  maintained  
their  working  relationship  for  more  than  30  years.  
 
After  the  Nazis  annexed  Austria  in  March  1938,  Meitner,  who  was  Jewish,  made  her  way  
to  Stockholm,  Sweden.  She  continued  to  work  with  Hahn,  corresponding  and  meeting  
secretly  in  Copenhagen  in  November  of  that  year.  
 
Although  Hahn  performed  the  experiments  that  produced  the  evidence  supporting  the  
idea  of  nuclear  fission,  he  was  unable  to  come  up  with  an  explanation.  Meitner  and  her  
nephew,  Otto  Frisch,  came  up  with  the  theory.  
 
Hahn  published  their  findings  without  including  Meitner  as  a  co-­‐author,  although  
several  accounts  say  Meitner  understood  this  omission,  given  the  situation  in  Nazi  
Germany.  
 
"That's  the  start  of  how  Meitner  got  separated  from  the  credit  of  discovering  nuclear  
fission,"  said  Lewin  Sime,  who  wrote  a  biography  of  Meitner.  
 
The  other  contributing  factor  to  the  neglect  of  Meitner's  work  was  her  gender.  Meitner  
once  wrote  to  a  friend  that  it  was  almost  a  crime  to  be  a  woman  in  Sweden.  A  researcher  
on  the  Nobel  physics  committee  actively  tried  to  shut  her  out.  So  Hahn  alone  won  the  
1944  Nobel  Prize  in  chemistry  for  his  contributions  to  splitting  the  atom.  
 
"Meitner's  colleagues  at  the  time,  including  physicist  Niels  Bohr,  absolutely  felt  she  was  
instrumental  in  the  discovery  of  nuclear  fission,"  Sime  said.  But  since  her  name  wasn't  
on  that  initial  paper  with  Hahn—and  she  was  left  off  the  Nobel  Prize  recognizing  the  
discovery—over  the  years,  she  has  not  been  associated  with  the  finding.  
 
The  nuclear  physicist  died  in  1968  in  Cambridge,  England.  (Learn  more  about  Meitner's  
career.)  
 
Rosalind  Franklin  
 
Born  in  1920  in  London,  Rosalind  Franklin  used  x-­‐rays  to  take  a  picture  of  DNA  that  
would  change  biology.  
 
Hers  is  perhaps  one  of  the  most  well-­‐known—and  shameful—instances  of  a  researcher  
being  robbed  of  credit,  said  Lewin  Sime.  
 
Franklin  graduated  with  a  doctorate  in  physical  chemistry  from  Cambridge  University  in  
1945,  then  spent  three  years  at  an  institute  in  Paris  where  she  learned  x-­‐ray  diffraction  
techniques,  or  the  ability  to  determine  the  molecular  structures  of  crystals.  (Learn  more  
about  her  education  and  qualifications.)  
 
She  returned  to  England  in  1951  as  a  research  associate  in  John  Randall's  laboratory  at  
King's  College  in  London  and  soon  encountered  Maurice  Wilkins,  who  was  leading  his  
own  research  group  studying  the  structure  of  DNA.  
 
Franklin  and  Wilkins  worked  on  separate  DNA  projects,  but  by  some  accounts,  Wilkins  
mistook  Franklin's  role  in  Randall's  lab  as  that  of  an  assistant  rather  than  head  of  her  
own  project.  
 
Meanwhile,  James  Watson  and  Francis  Crick,  both  at  Cambridge  University,  were  also  
trying  to  determine  the  structure  of  DNA.  They  communicated  with  Wilkins,  who  at  
some  point  showed  them  Franklin's  image  of  DNA—known  as  Photo  51—without  her  
knowledge.  
 
Photo  51  enabled  Watson,  Crick,  and  Wilkins  to  deduce  the  correct  structure  for  DNA,  
which  they  published  in  a  series  of  articles  in  the  journal  Nature  in  April  1953.  Franklin  
also  published  in  the  same  issue,  providing  further  details  on  DNA's  structure.  
 
Franklin's  image  of  the  DNA  molecule  was  key  to  deciphering  its  structure,  but  only  
Watson,  Crick,  and  Wilkins  received  the  1962  Nobel  Prize  in  physiology  or  medicine  for  
their  work.  
 
Franklin  died  of  ovarian  cancer  in  1958  in  London,  four  years  before  Watson,  Crick,  and  
Wilkins  received  the  Nobel.  Since  Nobel  prizes  aren't  awarded  posthumously,  we'll  
never  know  whether  Franklin  would  have  received  a  share  in  the  prize  for  her  work.  
(Learn  more  about  Franklin  and  Photo  51.)  
 
Nettie  Stevens  
 
Born  in  1861  in  Vermont,  Nettie  Stevens  performed  studies  crucial  in  determining  that  
an  organism's  sex  was  dictated  by  its  chromosomes  rather  than  environmental  or  other  
factors.  
 
After  receiving  her  doctorate  from  Bryn  Mawr  College  in  Pennsylvania,  Stevens  
continued  at  the  college  as  a  researcher  studying  sex  determination.  
 
By  working  on  mealworms,  she  was  able  to  deduce  that  the  males  produced  sperm  with  
X  and  Y  chromosomes—the  sex  chromosomes—and  that  females  produced  
reproductive  cells  with  only  X  chromosomes.  This  was  evidence  supporting  the  theory  
that  sex  determination  is  directed  by  an  organism's  genetics.  
 
A  fellow  researcher,  named  Edmund  Wilson,  is  said  to  have  done  similar  work,  but  came  
to  the  same  conclusion  later  than  Stevens  did.  
 
Stevens  fell  victim  to  a  phenomenon  known  as  the  Matilda  Effect—the  repression  or  
denial  of  the  contributions  of  female  researchers  to  science.  
 
Thomas  Hunt  Morgan,  a  prominent  geneticist  at  the  time,  is  often  credited  with  
discovering  the  genetic  basis  for  sex  determination,  said  Pomona  College's  Hoopes.  He  
was  the  first  to  write  a  genetics  textbook,  she  noted,  and  he  wanted  to  magnify  his  
contributions.  
 
"Textbooks  have  this  terrible  tendency  to  choose  the  same  evidence  as  other  textbooks,"  
she  added.  And  so  Stevens'  name  was  not  associated  with  the  discovery  of  sex  
determination.  
 
Hoopes  has  no  doubt  that  Morgan  was  indebted  to  Stevens.  "He  corresponded  with  
other  scientists  at  the  time  about  his  theories,"  she  said.  "[But]  his  letters  back  and  forth  
with  Nettie  Stevens  were  not  like  that.  He  was  asking  her  for  details  of  her  experiments."  
 
"When  she  died  [of  breast  cancer  in  1912],  he  wrote  about  her  in  Science,  [and]  he  wrote  
that  he  thought  she  didn't  have  a  broad  view  of  science,"  said  Hoopes.  "But  that's  
because  he  didn't  ask  her."  
 
And  now  we'd  like  to  ask:  Who  would  you  add  to  this  list  of  female  researchers  who  did  
not  get  the  credit  they  deserved  for  their  work?