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The presence of women in science spans the earliest times of the history of science wherein they have made significant 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.[1] Outside academia, botany was the science that benefitted most from contributions of women in early modern times.[2] The attitude toward educating women in medical fields appears to have been more liberal in Italy than in other places. 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.[3] 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.[4]
- ^ Whaley, Leigh Ann. Women's History as Scientists. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, INC. 2003.
- ^ "Women in Botany". womeninbotany.ur.de. Retrieved 7 April 2023.
- ^ Rutherford. "Marie Curie." The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 13, no. 39, 1935, pp. 673–676. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4203041. Accessed 18 Dec. 2020.
- ^ "Nobel Prize awarded women". NobelPrize.org. Retrieved 7 April 2023.