The Untold Stories Of Inspiring Women In Science & Technology In World History

On 22^nd December 2015, the General Assembly of the United Nations decided to establish an annual International Day to recognize the critical role women and girls play in science and technology, by a resolution. Consequently, The International Day of Women and Girls in Science is celebrated on the 11^th of February. The day is an opportunity to promote full and equal access to and participation in science for women and girls. Gender equality is a global priority and the support of young girls, their education and their full ability to make their ideas heard are levers for development and peace. Tackling some of the greatest challenges of the Agenda for Sustainable Development -- from improving health to combating climate change -- will rely on harnessing all talent. That means getting more women working in these fields.

Whilst the world fights together for the matter now, for a long time they did not. Rather, for most of the world history, you can see those extremely talented women who actually were engaged in science and technology were faced with all sorts of discrimination and unfair treatments. Despite making groundbreaking discoveries, their names remain largely unknown, simply because they were women. So in this day, let us explore some of these stories.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900 – 1979) was a British-born American astronomer who was the first to propose that stars are made of hydrogen and helium. She was born in Buckinghamshire, England. In 1919, she got a scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge University, where she initially studied botany, physics, and chemistry.

However, inspired by a lecture by Arthur Eddington, an English astronomer, she dropped out to study astronomy. Studying astronomy at Cambridge in the 1920s – if you were a woman – was ridiculous. Cecilia sat alone, as she was not allowed to occupy the same rows of seats as her male classmates. The ordeal did not end there. Because of her gender, Cecilia was not awarded a degree, despite fulfilling all the requirements in 1923. (Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948)

Finding no future for a woman scientist in England, she headed to the United States, where she received a fellowship to study at Harvard Observatory. In her Ph.D. thesis, published as Stellar Atmospheres in 1925, Cecilia showed for the first time how to read the surface temperature of any star from its spectrum. She also proposed that stars are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium.
In 1925, she became the first person to earn a PhD in astronomy. But she received the doctorate from Radcliffe College, since Harvard did not grant doctoral degrees to women then. She also came to become the first female professor in her faculty at Harvard in 1956.

In her lifetime, Cecelia contributed immensely to the physical understanding of starts and was honored with multiple awards.

Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu (1912 – 1997) is a Chinese-American physicist who is known for the Wu Experience which she carried out to disprove a quantum mechanics concept called the Law of Parity Conservation. Nevertheless, the Nobel Committee failed to recognize her contribution when theoretical physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, who worked on the project, were awarded the Prize instead.

Chien-Shiung Wu was born in a small town in the Jiangsu province in China. She studied physics at a university in Shanghai and then went on to complete her PhD from the University of California. In 1944, during WWII, she joined the Manhattan Project at Columbia University, focusing on radiation detectors. After the war, Wu began investigating beta decay and made the first confirmation of Enrico Fermi's theory of beta decay.

Her book Beta Decay, published in 1965 is still a standard reference for nuclear physicists.

In 1956, she was approached by Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang to devise an experiment to disprove the Law of Parity Conservation, according to which two physical systems, such as two atoms, are mirror images that behave in identical ways. Using a cobalt-60 a radioactive form of the cobalt metal, Wu’s experiment successfully disproved the law. In addition to this, her research helped answer important biological questions about blood and sickle cell anemia

Ada Lovelace

Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, (1815 – 1852) was the only child of the poet Lord Byron and Lady Byron. Lord Byron expected his child to be a "glorious boy" and was disappointed when Lady Byron gave birth to a girl.

She showed her gift for mathematics at an early stage. When she was 17, she met harles Babbage, a mathematician and inventor. The pair became friends, and the much older Babbage served as a mentor to Lovelace. Through Babbage, Lovelace began studying advanced mathematics with University of London professor Augustus de Morgan.

Lovelace was fascinated by Babbage's ideas. Known as the father of the computer, he invented the difference engine, which was meant to perform mathematical calculations. Lovelace got a chance to look at the machine before it was finished, and was captivated by it. Babbage also created plans for another device known as the analytical engine, designed to handle more complex calculations.

She was later asked to translate an article on Baggage’s analytical engine that had been written by Italian engineer Luigi Federico Menabrea for a Swiss journal. She not only translated the original French text into English but also added her own thoughts and ideas on the machine. Her notes ended up being three times longer than the original article. Her work was published in 1843 in an English science journal. In her notes, Lovelace described how codes could be created for the device to handle letters and symbols along with numbers. She also theorized a method for the engine to repeat a series of instructions, a process known as looping that computer programs use today. Lovelace also offered up other forward-thinking concepts in the article. For her work, Lovelace is often considered to be the first computer programmer.

Her article attracted little attention when she was alive. Hence, her contribution to the field of computer science was not discovered until the 1950s.

The ENIAC Programmers

In 1946, ix brilliant young women programmed the first all-electronic, programmable computer, the ENIAC, a project run by the U.S. Army in Philadelphia as part of a secret World War II project. They learned to program without programming languages or tools (for none existed)—only logical diagrams. By the time they were finished, ENIAC ran a ballistics trajectory—a differential calculus equation—in seconds! Yet when the ENIAC was unveiled to the press and the public in 1946, the women were never introduced; they remained invisible.

ENIAC’s six primary programmers were: Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman.