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Europe | U.K. | Activism

Women in science: Smashing glass ceilings and glass walls

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A woman engineer who worked on the moon landing spoke this week of how she was once told the control room was no place for women. Things have changed a lot in 50 years, but not as fast as some had hoped. BBC News spoke to five scientists from different generations who are breaking barriers in their field. Famous for discovering the first pulsar more than 50 years ago, Prof Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell has also been a lifelong advocate of women in science. As a school pupil in Northern Ireland in the 1950s, like other girls she was not permitted to study science until her parents (and others
Europe | U.K. | Science

Women in Science: Meet the Stemettes star inspiring more girls into STEM

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If there was ever someone to inspire girls into science, Anne-Marie Imafidon is the woman for the job. Imafidon is the co-founder of Stemettes, an award-winning social enterprise encouraging girls into the fields of science, technology, engineering and maths, and she has an intimidating CV. Having passed GCSEs in maths and ICT aged 10, she holds the current world record for the youngest girl ever to pass an A level in computing – she was 11. Two years later, she received a scholarship to study maths at a top US university. Imafidon then went on to become one of the youngest to be awarded
Europe | U.K. | Economy

The naked truth about women in science

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Feminists like me are under attack, and it’s not men who are the perpetrators, but women. One Saturday morning a few weeks ago I was sipping my Earl Grey and flicking through the Telegraph when I came across a headline that almost made me choke: ''My daughter shouldn’t have to study science”. The writer, Cristina Odone, was angry that her daughter Izzy, who is inclined to the arts, must also study Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths). Why, Odone asked, should Izzy be wasting her time in the lab or pondering quadratic equations when she could in
Europe | U.K. | Science

Female physicist overlooked for Nobel Prize finally receives recognition as Woman of the Year

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A female astrophysicist who was overlooked for a Nobel Prize in favour of two men who worked alongside her has been named one of the Women of the Year. Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell is widely acknowledged to have made one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the 20th century, when she detected the first radio pulsar, a kind of neutron star, in the late 1960s, as part of a postgraduate research project. While her supervisor, Antony Hewish, and another researcher, Martin Ryle, went on to collect the Nobel Prize for Physics, in 1974, for the discovery, Bell Burnell missed
Europe | U.K. | Health

Advent of the virgin births: Women who have never been in a relationship paying £5,000 to get pregnant

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Dozens of young heterosexual women have had virgin births after undergoing IVF in Britain, The Mail on Sunday can reveal. Some are using the £5,000 fertility treatment to bypass the need to involve a man, and others so that they can save themselves for a ‘special relationship’. Doctors said last night at least 25 straight women had given birth in the past five years despite being virgins. But campaigners for the traditional family said the ‘distorted’ move turned babies into little more than ‘teddy bears’ to be ‘picked off the shelf’. Religious groups said it undermined the
Europe | U.K. | Science

The unseen women scientists behind Tim Hunt’s Nobel prize – Joan Ruderman and Katherine Swenson and more

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Hunt’s key breakthrough about the cell cycle, the discovery cyclins, centred on his experiments with sea urchins and clams in the Marine Biology Laboratory, Woods Hole. It was here that he worked extensively with Joan Ruderman, a period he later said “opened up new horizons, not only in learning to deal with new systems, but in the breadth of approaches and interests of scientists who passed through Woods Hole”. In his Nobel lecture, Hunt lauded the simple, but brilliant, experiments of Ruderman and Katherine Swenson, who were the first to show that cyclins bring about cell division. He
Europe | U.K. | Activism

Nobel scientist resigns over sexist remarks about women in labs

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The scientist and Nobel laureate who sparked criticism after saying women in laboratories "fall in love with you and when you criticize them, they cry" has resigned from his position at a UK university. In a brief statement on its website, University College London (UCL) said that Tim Hunt had resigned from his position as Honorary Professor with the university's Faculty of Life Sciences "following comments he made about women in science." "UCL was the first university in England to admit women students on equal terms to men, and the university believes that this outcome is compatible
Europe | U.K. | Science

Female Scientists Respond Brilliantly To Biochemist Calling Women Distractions [UPDATE]

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After asserting that female scientists should be segregated from their male peers because they distract them, fall in love with them and cry, British biochemist Tim Hunt issued a half-hearted apology Wednesday -- and women in science are letting him have it. Hunt, 72, a Nobel Prize winner and fellow with the United Kingdom's prestigious Royal Society science body, came under fire this week for advocating for single-sex labs in a speech at the World Conference of Science Journalists in South Korea, "Three things happen when [women] are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in
Europe | U.K. | Science

Foremost Geneticists: Mary Lyon obituary

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Mary Lyon, who has died aged 89, was one of the foremost geneticists of the 20th century. She used the mouse as a powerful genetic tool to gain fundamental and profound insights into mammalian genetics and the genetic bases of disease. Perhaps her greatest achievement was to propose in 1961 the theory of X chromosome inactivation, in which she suggested that one of the two X chromosomes in the cells of female mammals is randomly inactivated during early development. This process is now sometimes referred to as Lyonisation, and the theory has had a fundamental impact on research into mammali

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