Credit where credit is due: Kat Ross

What stories, narratives, beliefs and perceptions are behind the images we see with our mind’s eye?

For example, when you picture a scientist, what do you see? 

Lou Conran she sees is her sister, Dr Nicola Conran - an internationally recognised professor of biochemistry, leading research teams to find a cure for sickle cell. I immediately went researching Nicola after our chat. She is very impressive, nearly 2800 citations of her 168 papers. 

Certainly a role model for those curious about practicing science.

Lou recalls that the scientist Nicola saw, who became her inspiration, was Margaret Thatcher.

“It’s great that it’s a woman, but it’s Margaret Thatcher!”

Image: Captain Kathryn Janeway, an example of a good narrative, but not a common one.

For astronomer Kat Ross, their mind’s eye never envisioned a real woman scientist – perhaps it was something closer to what springs to mind for most of us – a man with crazy hair and a lab coat. But they did find inspiration in the fictional world:

“It was Captain Kathryn Janeway of the Star Trek Voyager, absolutely badass, an incredible scientist.”

There's an article on the Star Trek website by author TJ Cederlöf who evidently feels similar to Kat: that Captain Janeway really was a revolutionary representation of a woman on screen. 

Captain Janeway lead a crew through Space and before her career in law and politics, Margaret Thatcher was a research chemist, rumoured to have invented the Mr Whippy icecream (though, sadly, this seems to not be the case).

But there are, and always have been, plenty of women working in the sciences. They just don’t get the same visibility as their male counterparts, which continues to fuel the narrative that there aren’t many women here. 

This led to Kat founding IncludeHer, an organisation working with teachers and curriculum developers to get women named in the curriculum. 

This is so close to the point, Kat says. We haven't heard of many women scientists because we're not taught about them. We're taught a narrative of the lone male genius. 

Kat’s work in teaching teachers the science curriculum a few years ago led to questions on women’s representation. This became a full research paper, Invisible women: Gender representation in high school science courses across Australia. Their research on gender representation in high school science showed that of the 145 scientists named, one was a woman (Rosalind Franklin). Even Marie Curie, the pioneer of radioactivity research and winner of two Nobel Prizes, was not mentioned.

Kat says that if you put the names of scientists next to the science that students are already learning, you can increase representation of women in the curriculum by 30 percent.

These are people like Marie Curie, Lise Meitner (discovered nuclear fission), Eunice Foote (discovered the heating effect of CO2 in the atmosphere), Maria Goeppert-Mayer (developed the nuclear shell model of the atom), Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (determined biochemical structures using X-Ray techniques and taught Thatcher at Oxford University), and Margaret Hamilton (developed onboard flight software for the Apollo missions), pictured above. But there are so many more. 

The lack of recognition and credit comes from the narratives society tells itself around our desires, capabilities, and value. The male genius was more valued and more prized, protecting the male role as intellectual and the female role as homemaker seen as paramount in Western societies. So it’s worth taking a moment to analyse these narratives to consider the motivations behind them, as well as what we’re being told, by whom, and who is missing. Who is getting the credit, and why?

Kat asks us all to have conversations where we untangle these narratives, pick apart our biases, and find out about some really amazing scientists. 

Image: Marie Curie in her lab. Credit: Getty Images (though I nabbed it from the Curie the Musical website).

Part of the IncludeHer workshops with students is to look at the narratives they currently have around science, examine the biases that they may hold, and really marinate with the fact that that's not very accurate. The scientist isn't just the man with the crazy hair, it's all of us. And history really is on our side. 

After all, ‘scientist’ was coined by William Whewell to describe polymath Mary Somerville, as he needed another term for ‘man of science’. This makes the correct usages ‘male scientist’ for a man and ‘scientist’ for a woman.

So next time you picture 'a scientist' ask yourself, why do they look like that? It might lead you down an interesting path, and you might discover some great scientists on the way.    

Image below: Margaret Hamilton's code for the Apollo mission's onboard flight software. Credit:  The Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum