Writ­ten for Ms. Blog on March 26, 2010

The per­sis­tent dearth of women sci­en­tists has been researched, con­tested and spec­u­lated upon in recent years, with study after study inter­pret­ing this paucity as born of bias, biol­ogy or some com­bi­na­tion of both. But amid this under­stand­able con­cern about why so few women suc­ceed in sci­ence, another sig­nif­i­cant ques­tion is often neglected: how the few women who have suc­ceeded man­aged to do so.

For­tu­nately, a new book out by the Fem­i­nist Press may help fill that gap: The Madame Curie Com­plex, by his­to­rian Julie Des Jardins, chal­lenges the pre­vail­ing notion that inter­est and apti­tude are enough to rec­tify gen­der dis­par­ity in sci­ence. As she illus­trates through a dozen or so pro­files of women sci­en­tists from Marie Curie onward, when pas­sion and genius take a woman’s shape, the male-dominated sci­en­tific com­mu­nity puts her in her place.

It’s mad­den­ing to note that, even in the past 100 years, the break­through sci­en­tific work of extra­or­di­nary women has been will­fully appro­pri­ated by or attrib­uted to the men who shared their labs. Today, few peo­ple remem­ber that the world’s most pop­u­lar woman sci­en­tist, Marie Curie, was long dis­missed by her con­tem­po­raries as lit­tle more than her husband’s assis­tant: Even her Nobel prize was con­tested by fel­low sci­en­tists. More­over, at roughly the same time, men astronomers at Har­vard and MIT were pub­lish­ing under their own names the ground­break­ing research of their low-paid, less-educated women lab assis­tants. Decades later, mol­e­c­u­lar biol­o­gist Ros­alind Franklin spent years metic­u­lously uncov­er­ing the dou­ble helix struc­ture of DNA, only to have her work usurped by 25-year-old James Wat­son, who won a Nobel prize for what was arguably her discovery.

How these women, some of whom Des Jardins makes a point of describ­ing as pro­fes­sion­ally oblig­ing and socially pas­sive, man­aged to earn world­wide acclaim against such a misog­y­nis­tic back­drop is espe­cially curi­ous. While genius and per­se­ver­ance cer­tainly played a role, their rela­tion­ships to notable men (in par­tic­u­lar, other Nobel lau­re­ates) may have played an even larger one. Des Jardins never makes the mis­take of attribut­ing the women’s suc­cesses to men, but her care­ful explo­ration of their per­sonal and pro­fes­sional rela­tion­ships cer­tainly under­scores the cru­cial impor­tance of male allies in their strug­gle for gen­der equal­ity. As she demon­strates in these inti­mate his­to­ries, the tenac­ity of women–in com­bi­na­tion with the sup­port of a few unbi­ased men–has fos­tered leaps in women’s progress.

The Madame Curie Com­plex only takes us into the 1970s, but more recent events reveal that sci­ence is still plagued by many of the same biases. For exam­ple, when for­mer Har­vard pres­i­dent Lawrence Sum­mers opined five years ago that women’s under-representation in sci­ence could be chocked up to innate gen­der dif­fer­ences,  responses to his sex­ist com­ments exposed con­tem­po­rary inequities within the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity. Most mem­o­rable of these retorts was an essay writ­ten by neu­ro­bi­ol­o­gist Ben Bar­res, who described the sex­ual dis­crim­i­na­tion he expe­ri­enced when he was a woman:

As an under­grad at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy (MIT), I was the only per­son in a large class of nearly all men to solve a hard maths prob­lem, only to be told by the pro­fes­sor that my boyfriend must have solved it for me… I am still dis­ap­pointed about the pres­ti­gious fel­low­ship com­pe­ti­tion I later lost to a male con­tem­po­rary when I was a PhD stu­dent, even though the Har­vard dean who had read both appli­ca­tions assured me that my appli­ca­tion was much stronger. … Shortly after I changed sex, a fac­ulty mem­ber was heard to say “Ben Bar­res gave a great sem­i­nar today, but then his work is much bet­ter than his sister’s.”

Today, pop­u­lar focus on the absence of women in sci­ence obscures the chal­lenges still faced by women sci­en­tists oper­at­ing in what Des Jardins char­ac­ter­izes as a need­lessly and adversely mas­culin­ized field. The Madame Curie Com­plex reminds us that in spite of our con­ven­tional equa­tion of sci­ence with progress, the sci­en­tific com­mu­nity itself has yet to achieve objectivity.

THE MADAME CURIE COMPLEX
The Hid­den His­tory of Women in Sci­ence
By Julie Des Jardins
The Fem­i­nist Press
ISBN: 978–1-55861–613-40

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