Women in science

The presence of women in science spans the earliest times of the history of science wherein they have made substantial contributions. Historians with an interest in gender and science have researched the scientific endeavors and accomplishments of women, the barriers they have faced, and the strategies implemented to have their work peer-reviewed and accepted in major scientific journals and other publications. The historical, critical, and sociological study of these issues has become an academic discipline in its own right.

The involvement of women in medicine occurred in several early Western civilizations, and the study of natural philosophy in ancient Greece was open to women. Women contributed to the proto-science of alchemy in the first or second centuries CE During the Middle Ages, religious convents were an important place of education for women, and some of these communities provided opportunities for women to contribute to scholarly research. The 11th century saw the emergence of the first universities; women were, for the most part, excluded from university education. Outside academia, botany was the science that benefitted most from the contributions of women in early modern times. The attitude toward educating women in medical fields appears to have been more liberal in Italy than elsewhere. The first known woman to earn a university chair in a scientific field of studies was eighteenth-century Italian scientist Laura Bassi.

Gender roles were largely deterministic in the eighteenth century and women made substantial advances in science. During the nineteenth century, women were excluded from most formal scientific education, but they began to be admitted into learned societies during this period. In the later nineteenth century, the rise of the women's college provided jobs for women scientists and opportunities for education. Marie Curie paved the way for scientists to study radioactive decay and discovered the elements radium and polonium. Working as a physicist and chemist, she conducted pioneering research on radioactive decay and was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics and became the first person to receive a second Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Sixty women have been awarded the Nobel Prize between 1901 and 2022. Twenty-four women have been awarded the Nobel Prize in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine.

In the 1970s and 1980s, many books and articles about women scientists were appearing; virtually all of the published sources ignored women of color and women outside of Europe and North America. The formation of the Kovalevskaia Fund in 1985 and the Organization for Women in Science for the Developing World in 1993 gave more visibility to previously marginalized women scientists, but even today there is a dearth of information about current and historical women in science in developing countries. According to academic Ann Hibner Koblitz:

Most work on women scientists has focused on the personalities and scientific subcultures of Western Europe and North America, and historians of women in science have implicitly or explicitly assumed that the observations made for those regions will hold true for the rest of the world.

Koblitz has said that these generalizations about women in science often do not hold up cross-culturally:

A scientific or technical field that might be considered 'unwomanly' in one country in a given period may enjoy the participation of many women in a different historical period or in another country. An example is engineering, which in many countries is considered the exclusive domain of men, especially in usually prestigious subfields such as electrical or mechanical engineering. There are exceptions to this, however. In the former Soviet Union all subspecialties of engineering had high percentages of women, and at the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería of Nicaragua, women made up 70% of engineering students in 1990.

The involvement of women in the field of medicine has been recorded in several early civilizations. An ancient Egyptian physician, Peseshet (c. 2600–2500 B.C.E.), described in an inscription as "lady overseer of the female physicians", is the earliest known female physician named in the history of science. Agamede was cited by Homer as a healer in ancient Greece before the Trojan War (c. 1194–1184 BCE). According to one late antique legend, Agnodice was the first female physician to practice legally in fourth century BCE Athens.