NNAIRE
Women and Science
A look at those who advanced knowledge
Available at the University Library, Women and Science is a work that explores the place of women in scientific history—between major discoveries, erasure and late recognition.
Through portraits, archives and analyses, it highlights those who, like Lise Meitner, contributed to research despite social and institutional barriers.
Book Excerpts
"From early childhood, girls omnipresent in science wonder why they don't find answers to the questions they ask. They face well-established mentalities on the subject. We discover an analysis of a lack of personalities. Fictions of all kinds, offering a kind of apology for discrimination in science. One wonders: if often enough - analyzing facts, searching, scientists who publish rather than fighting for their recognition. How can we then explain the result and the invisibility that women scientists achieve? Can we see a kind of glass ceiling in scientific sections?"
Key Ideas
1. Refutation of the Ineptitude Prejudice
The author contests the idea that the low number of women in "hard" sciences (mathematics, physics) is due to biological ineptitude or natural disinterest.
Excerpt: Dismantling Early Stereotypes
"Girls' weak interest in science seems more a consequence of the environment in which they are born and grow up than the cause of an imbalance between girls and boys in scientific sections."
The work goes further by refuting modern arguments about the "male/female brain", asserting that observed differences in brain activation are more due to strongly differentiated education than to genetics.
2. Institutional Exclusion is Historical and Ideological
The book shows that women's exclusion is a cultural phenomenon, not a scientific one.
Excerpt: The Real Cause of Oblivion
"A journey, even a quick one, through the history of women in science can show that the fact of keeping them away from science is more due to ideological, religious, social and political reasons than to biological reasons."
3. Tribute to Forgotten and Eclipsed Figures
The work provides a historical overview of great female figures in all scientific disciplines (astronomy, mathematics, physics, medicine), from ancient pioneers to Nobel Prize winners. It highlights:
- Hypatia of Alexandria: Martyr figure of Antiquity, murdered by Christian fanatics.
- Marquise du Châtelet: Newton's collaborator and commentator, who had to impose herself in an exclusively male academic world.
- Lise Meitner: Notorious victim of the Matilda Effect, unfairly deprived of the Nobel Prize for the discovery of nuclear fission.
- Marie Curie: The exception that proves the rule, the only person to have received two Nobel Prizes in two different disciplines, but who was nevertheless refused entry to the Academy of Sciences.