In 2007, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) released Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Promise of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, an influential study suggesting that women face a hostile environment in the laboratory. The NAS report dismissed the possibi...

From Maria Winkelman's discovery of the comet of 1702 to the Nobel Prize-winning work of twentieth-century scientist Barbara McClintock, women have played a central role in modern science. Their successes have not come easily, nor have they been consistently recognized. This book examines the challenges and barriers women scientists have faced and chronicles their achievements as they struggled to attain recognition for their work in the male-dominated world of modern science.

Winner of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Prize In volume one of this landmark study, focusing on developments up to 1940, Margaret Rossiter describes the activities and personalities of the numerous women scientists—astronomers, chemists, biologists, and psychologists—who overcame extraordinary obstacles to contribute to the growth of American science. This remarkable history recounts women's efforts to establish themselves as members of the scientific community and examines the forces that inhibited their active and visible participation in the sciences.

The first book of its kind to provide a full and comprehensive historical grounding of the contemporary issues of gender and women in science. Women in Science includes a detailed survey of the history behind the popular subject and engages the reader with a theoretical and informed understanding with significant issues like science and race, gender and technology and masculinity. It moves beyond the historical work on women and science by avoiding focusing on individual women scientists.

Women of Science is a collection of essays dealing with contributions women have made to various scientific disciplines, written by women scientists in those disciplines. The areas covered are: astronomy, archaeology, biology, chemistry, crystallography, engineering, geology, mathematics, medicine, and physics. The women who have written these essays are, for the most part, not professional historians, but rather scientific professionals who felt the necessity of researching the contributions women have made to the devlopment of their fields. The essays are unique, not only because they recover lost women who made significant contributions to their disciplines, but also because they are written with a depth of understanding that only a scientist working in a specific area can have. The essays will be of interest not only to students (especially women students) of science who may be unaware of the many contributions women have made, but also to readers of the history of science whoses texts more often than not fail to include the work of most women scientists.

From the ancient Greek physician Agamede to physicist and chemist Marie Curie, in descriptions ranging from a single paragraph to several pages, Women in Science profiles 186 women who as patronesses, translators, popularizers, collectors, illustrators, inventors, and active researchers, made significant contributions to science before 1910. It adds a new dimension to the history of science by rescuing from obscurity the many women who overcame significant cultural barriers to pursue scientific objectives. Was Marie Curie the only woman in science? This question, asked by a college student trying to write an essay on women in science, planted a seed that grew over a decade of research into this informative and accessible biographical dictionary and bibliography. At the heart of this biographical dictionary are profiles of 186 women whose work is representative of the participation of women in the science of their time and culture. Despite the increasing attention devoted to women's history in recent years, our knowledge of many of these women is still meager, and the book will serve as much as a guide to future research as a resource for historians, librarians, students, and the general public. The book opens with a substantial essay relating the general state of science and philosophical ideas about the role of women in society to the actual participation of women in science over the past two and a half millennia. The classified, annotated bibliography that completes the book can be used as a general research tool as well as a source of information about the particular women whose lives are sketched in this work. The entries provide basic information on their subjects, are referenced to primary sources and other materials in the bibliography, and share an easily flowing narrative style. Beyond that, the length, approach, and focus of the entries have been allowed to vary within an appropriate range to suit the particular women whose lives they recount and whose achievements they evaluate.

This encyclopedia surveys the scientific research on gender throughout the ages—the people, experiments, and impact—of both legitimate and illegitimate findings on the scientific community, women scientists, and society at large. Women, Science, and Myth: Gender Beliefs from Antiquity to the Present examines the ways scientists have researched gender throughout history, the ways those results have affected society, and the impact they have had on the scientific community and on women, women scientists, and women's rights movements. In chronologically organized entries, Women, Science, and Myth explores the people and experiments that exemplify the problematic relationship between science and gender throughout the centuries, with particular emphasis on the 20th century. The encyclopedia offers a section on focused cross-period themes such as myths of gender in different scientific disciplines and the influence of cultural norms on specific eras of gender research. It is a timely and revealing resource that celebrates science's legitimate accomplishments in understanding gender while unmasking the sources of a number of debilitating biases concerning women's intelligence and physical attributes.