Four women researchers who were overshadowed in the sciences
FollowAs an advocate of women in science, I am illustrating why supporting the presence of women researchers as the voices of science today plays the crucial role, by presenting four stories of women who have changed the world in the male-dominated world of science, and still have been overlooked throughout their careers.
Beside well known women scientists who had to deal with biases against them in the STEM, such as Ada Lovelace, Marie Curie, Vera Rubin, Hedy Lamarr and many others who invented the core technologies that make civilization possible, here are four female scientists who did groundbreaking work and have made those contributions in spite of astonishing hurdles due to sexism.
Nettie Stevens, born on 7 July, 1861, in Cavendish, Vermont, was an American biologist and geneticist who was one of the first scientists to find that sex is determined by a particular configuration of chromosomes.
She received a Ph.D. in biology from Bryn Mawr College in 1903 and remained at the college as a research fellow in biology for a year, as reader in experimental morphology for another year, and as associate in experimental morphology from 1905 until her death, in 1912.
She discovered that chromosomes determined sex, and in her first study, she looked at sex determination in the common mealworm. Investigating the mealworms, she found that the males contained reproductive cells with both X and Y chromosomes whereas the females contained only those with X. She proposed that these two chromosomes be called X and Y, and explained that sex is inherited as a chromosomal factor and that males determine the gender of the offspring. Her work on sex determination was published as a Carnegie Institute report in 1905.
“At the time, the chromosomal theory of inheritance was not yet accepted, and it was commonly believed that gender was determined by the mother and/or environmental factors.
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