1. Mothers in Science
By Noreka Thomas, Kyle Hamilton, Starr Abdelhadi, and Lauren Montgomery

2. Female Scientists of the 1800’s
Lauren Montgomery

3. Overview “Separate spheres” ideology was common in the 19th century
The female sphere was private – family and domestic matters
The male sphere was public – politics, careers, and everything else
Science was definitely not in woman’s sphere, and it took a very determined woman to enter the field

4. Marie Curie
Perhaps one of the most famous mothers in science, Marie Curie was born Marie Sklodowska in 1867
Unable to attend Russian universities, she became the first woman to receive a doctorate from a French university, and the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize
She is best known for her discovery, with her husband Pierre, of radium and polonium

5. Balancing Motherhood and Science
After her daughters’ birth, Marie continued her scientific work
In fact, during WWI, she recruited her older daughter, Irene, to help her promote mobile radiology units for the wounded

6. Ada Lovelace
Born Augusta Ada Byron, daughter of Lord Byron, Ada Lovelace invented computer programming in 1843
She worked with Charles Babbage’s “Calculating Engine” and developed a punch card program

7. Balancing Motherhood and Science
Ada married Lord William Lovelace in 1835 and had three children
Her husband was very supportive
Ada’s mother raised the children, letting Ada concentrate on her work

8. Female Scientists of the1900’s-1950’s
Starr Abdelhadi

9. Overview
The number of female scientists increased substantially in the 1930s, rising approximately 320% beyond what it was in the early 1920s, although still remaining low in relation to the number of men who earned degrees in the sciences. A 1938 survey listed a total of 1,726 women scientists, not including the medical sciences. The largest numbers in 1938 were spread over zoology (281), psychology (277), and botany (256), while the lowest were in engineering (8), anthropology (29), and astronomy (36). The statistics, however, only indicate the number of female scientists who actually got jobs, as opposed to those who had trained in those fields but got by on various grants.

10. Increase for the desire to learn in 1900’s
Women moved into science in significant numbers by 1900, helped by the women's colleges and by opportunities at some of the new universities. Provides an overview of this period, stressing the opportunities women found in separate women's work in science.

11. Feminism
We can define feminism as a collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies that seek to establish the liberation of women from their subordination to men. In other words, feminism pursues social, political and economic equality for women. Some of the issues feminists tackled during the 1900s include unequal pay for equal work, exclusion from influential positions, and innumerable specific legal restrictions denying women equal opportunities in American life. In the 1960s the National Organization of Women (NOW) became the preeminent reform organization for women and campaigned heavily for abortion rights.

12. Women of the 1900’s Police Arrested Women For Smoking
In the later 19th century the rise of the women's college provided jobs for women scientists, and opportunities for education. Women colleges produced a disproportionate number of women who went on for Ph.Ds in science.

13. Family/Background Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin-
(May 10, 1900 – December 7, 1979)
Education
Eddington major influence in Astronomy
Did not receive Degree in Cambridge
Fled to the U.S in 1923
First to show that the Sun is mainly composed of hydrogen, in 1925

14. Career/Personal Life Payne became an American in 1931
Married Sergei I Gaposchkin in Germany
Three children
Worked as a Technical Assistant for Shapley
Became an astronomer in 1938
1956 first woman Professor at Harvard
First Woman to be head of the Dept.

15. Books She published several books including:
"Stars of High Luminosity" (1930),
"Variable Stars" (1938),
"Variable Stars and Galactic Structure" (1954),
"Introduction to Astronomy" (1956),
"The Galactic Novae" (1957),
"Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: an autobiography and other recollections" (1984) ed. Katherine Haramundanis

16. Female Scientists of the 1950’s to 1990’s
Noreka Thomas

17. Overview
I will be discussing two women scientists: Irene Joliot-Curie and Gerty Theresa Cori. These women set the tone for many things in science from biochemical studies to anesthesiology. They were mothers who balanced their successful careers with their family. This wasn’t an easy task for women in this era, because women were supposed to be mothers alone not scientists. Thankfully, some women decided to step outside the box.

18. Irene Joliot- Curie
Born in Paris, France in 1897, the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie.
Little formal schooling, due to the lack of education given to girls, so she attended an informal school. She was taught physics by her mother, mathematics by Paul Langevin, and chemistry by Jean Baptiste Perrin.
Her mother organized a teaching cooperative named Sorbonne, where her laboratory was. Irene became the star pupil as she excelled in physics and chemistry.
At the age of fourteen, the cooperative folded and Irene had to go to a private school (College Sevigne) where she would earn her degree.
In 1921, at the age of twenty-one, she became her mother’s assistant at the Radium Institute where she would later become director in She stayed here for her whole life.
She had the largest supply of radioactive materials in the world, namely Polonium, an element her parents discovered.
She discovered that Polonium had alpha particles and could bombard aluminum nuclei, producing radioactive phosphorus.
She used the alpha bombardment technique on other elements, finding that when a nucleus of a particular element combined with an alpha particle, it would transform that element into another, radioactive element with a higher number of protons in its nucleus. With her husband by her side they had created artificial radioactivity. They announced this breakthrough in 1934.
After her husband was removed from his post as head of the French Atomic Energy Commission, they both became out spoken on the use of nuclear energy for the cause of peace.
Irene was a member of the World Peace Council and made several trips to the Soviet Union. It was the height of the Cold War and because of her politics, Irene was shunned by the American Chemical Society when she applied for membership in 1954.
Her final contribution to physics came as she helped plan a large particle accelerator and laboratory at Orsay, south of Paris in 1955.
Her health worsened and on March 17, 1956, Irene Joliot-Curie died as her mother had before her, of leukemia resulting from a lifetime of exposure to radiation.
This was vital in pure science and it’s many applications. Because it allowed the trace of radioactive elements in medical diagnoses as well as countless experiments.
Irene with her husband won the Noble Prize in 1935 for their remarkable discovery. Her mother died before she received this award.

19. Balancing Family Life and Science
In 1926 she married Frederic Joliot.
Like her mother, Irene Joliot-Curie produced a further generation of scientists. Her daughter, Hélène, married the son of Marie Curie's old companion, Paul Langevin, and, together with her brother, Paul, became a distinguished physicist.
Winning the Noble Prize along with other awards and honors had little impact on Irene. She preferred spending her free time with reading poetry, swimming, sailing and hiking with her children Helene and Pierre. As they grew older, she became interested and involved in the social movements (women’s suffrage) and politics.
She was a part of the French Resistance movement and by 1944, Irene and her children fled France for Switzerland. After the war she was appointed director of the Radium Institute and was also a commissioner for the French atomic energy project. She put in long days in the laboratory and continued to lecture and present papers on radioactivity although her health was slowly deteriorating.

20. Gerty Cori
She was the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize (with her husband) in “The love for and dedication to one’s work seem to me to be the basis for happiness.”
Her work was with biochemistry, where she would understand the process of sugar metabolism-called the Cori Cycle.
She spent her life researching carbohydrates and the chemical reactions that the body uses to break down carbohydrates, i.e. sugar.
She also discovered “ the Cori ester”, a break down product of glycogen, the form in which sugar is stored in muscles. She was able to reverse this reaction in a test tube, forming glycogen again.
Identifying the cyclical process that muscle cells use to make and store energy was vital in this era, because people had no idea how to treat diabetes . This cycle help grasp the concept of what causes diabetes and what medicines to use to teat it.
Gerty Cori was born in Prague in 1896 and was the daughter of a Jewish businessman, where she was home schooled until she was ten, where she attended a girls preparatory school.
In these days girls schools were as challenged as boys schools. They received more attention from the teachers.
She wanted to attend the Carl Ferdinand University in Prague where her uncle taught, but she didn’t have the proper education.
In 1914 she enrolled in a medical school at the German university of Prague. She met Carl Cori (husband) here, they had different personalities, but they shared the same goal: to become medical researchers. They married and graduated in 1920.
In 1931, she became a worker at Washington University in St. Louis, MO where her husband was a professor. Where she still continued her full time work as a researcher.
She gave birth to their first and only son Thomas Cori, who later became a leading scientist-businessman.
It wasn’t until 1943 that Gerty was promoted to a faculty position, she gained full time employment in The same year her and her husband won the Noble Prize.
She died in 1957 at the age of 61, from a bone marrow disease called myelosclerosis.

21. Modern Women Scientists: 2000-present
Kyle Hamilton

22. The Current Path to Becoming a Scientist
The academic career path has a long apprenticeship. Typically there is an undergraduate degree, followed by a PhD, then some post-doctoral research contracts and research fellowships, and then finally a more stable lectureship or permanent research leader position, with promotion on up the ladder to follow.
 A major crunch point for women comes at the appointment to lectureships, which are scarce, but subsequent promotion also seems to be problematic, leading to the metaphor of the leaky pipeline with the under-representation of women increasing at every career stage. Official statistics for the academic year 2005/06 show 23% of lecturers, 13% of senior lecturers and readers and just 7% of professors in science subjects are women. The figures are gradually improving, but none the less, they are not good, and much hand wringing has ensued.
If aspiring women scientists are always reading about how difficult it is to succeed, is it any wonder that they opt for alternative career paths?

23. Elizabeth Blackburn
Dr. Elizabeth H. Blackburn, Morris Herztein Professor of Biology and Physiology in the Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics at the University of California, San Francisco, is a leader in the area of telomere and telomerase research.
She discovered the molecular nature of telomeres - the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes that serve as protective caps essential for preserving the genetic information - and the ribonucleoprotein enzyme, telomerase. Blackburn and her research team at the University of California, San Francisco are working with various cells including human cells, with the goal of understanding telomerase and telomere biology.

In 2009, Dr. Blackburn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.

24. Kristala Jones Prather
Kristala Jones Prather developed ways to produce drugs using biological processes rather than chemical reactions. By over expressing a few key genes or inserting genes from a separate organism into a cell, she converted common bugs such as the bacterium Escherichia coli into chemical factories.
Today, she is working to devise ever-more-elaborate microbial chemical factories. Properly harnessed, these microbes could make a difference by creating new materials for use in drugs and other products and helping industry cut costs.
As one of two minority female faculty members in her department, she is sought out by students from underrepresented groups. She frequently participates in programs aimed at reaching these students. The opportunity to reach out to women and minority students--and teach them--was among the factors that drew her back to academia.

25. Professor Ottoline Leyser
Was married after graduating from college and had children while getting her post-doctorate. During this time, a senior scientist told her that she was throwing her career away. Her husband was a stay at home writer and became the main childcare provider.
Was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Prince Charles in 2009 for services to plant science.
 She wrote the book “Mothers in Science”, which profiles the lives and careers of 64 different women scientists. The book is available for free on the internet.

26. References
“Ada Lovelace.” (2007). The Great Idea Finder. Retrieved from
“Biomolecules.” (2010). Chemical Heritage Foundation. Retrieved from
Blackburn, Elizabeth. "Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn." (n.d.) Blackburn Lab. University of California San Francisco. Retrieved from
Frood, A. "Expanded web feature: Spotlight on Professor Ottoline Leyser.“ (n.d.) BBSRC: bioscience for the future. Retrieved from
Gaidos, S. "The Bigger Questions.“ (n.d.) Science Careers. AAAS.ORG. Retrieved from
“Irene Joliot-Curie.” (2011). Answers.com. Retreived from

27. References Cont.
Lewis, J. “Separate Spheres.” (2011). About.com. Retrieved from
“Madam Marie Curie.” (2011). Mothers Day Central. Retrieved from
McCormick, J. “Happy birthday Ada.” (1997). Ada Home. Retrieved from
Ottoline, L. Mothers in science- 64 ways to have it all. (2011). The Royal Society. Retrieved from
“Women in Science.” (2011). eNotes.com. Retrieved from