Women were first allowed to become Fellows
for the first time in 1916.
This is after the Royal Charter has been changed and a bye-law has been added, which states:
“words denoting the masculine gender only
shall include the feminine gender also.”
Eleven women were elected that year, including
Annie Maunder. And Isis Pogson was finally
elected in 1920. This is 34 years after she was originally
[nominated].
Other women elected that year were Alice Grace
Cook and Fiammetta Wilson.
Now, they worked for the Meteor Section of
the BAA and Cook wrote of how Wilson would
work while “shrapnel was falling, making
things highly dangerous and zeppelins were
dropping bombs in the area”.
World War Two obviously had a devastating
effect on everyone. There were 60 million
casualties, about 17 million people were murdered
in the holocaust, including 6 million Jewish people.
And of course some of those are going to include female scientists. Like Margarete Kahn.
Kahn was one of the first women to get a PhD in Germany. She became a doctor of mathematics in 1909.
Women weren’t allowed to teach at universities at the time, and she became a schoolteacher.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, Jewish
people were removed from their posts.
She was put into forced labour in 1936, and
has been considered missing since 1942.
Some people managed to escape, and I’m going
to tell you about one of them now, Marietta Blau.
Blau is known for making the photographic
plates, when you see photos like this
one from CERN of particles, she was the one
that invented these plates, and she explained
the physics behind it, how you could devise
information from the particle based on the
shape of the tracks.
In 1933, Hitler came to power, and almost
everyone in Austria, almost every Jewish person
who wasn’t an Austrian citizen, and hadn’t
fought on the side of Germany during World War I,
was removed from their posts. Now Blau was Jewish but was also Austrian and she chose to stay.
She was working with another woman called
Hertha Wambacher.
Now she, unbeknownst to Blau, had joined the Nazi Party in 1934.
The two women continued to work together for
many years. In 1937, they both discovered
cosmic rays in these plates. Now cosmic rays
are high-energy particles that enter the Earth’s
atmosphere from space and we think they come
from other stars. So that’s actually quite
an extraordinary discovery.
Blau finally escaped in 1938, [Albert Einstein]
helped her, he'd got her a job teaching physics
in a school in Mexico and she left.
Wambacher stayed and carried on the work,
she ended up working at the University of Vienna.
She was removed from her post in 1945.
She worked for 5 years in a research lab
until she died in 1950.
That year, Schrödinger – who I’m hoping
you might know from Schrodinger’s cat – he
nominated Blau for a Nobel Prize, unfortunately,
she lost out to Cecil Powell, who’d been
inspired by her work.
It wasn’t until 1960 that Blau returned
to Austria, where she worked without pay for
four years, until she was 70 years old. At
that point, CERN hired her. And CERN paid
her to head of a team analysing the tracks
of particles.
So I think she has quite an extraordinary
story and there are a lot of other people
like this as well that I haven’t really
had time to mention today.
At the same time, in America, they began to
hire women for the first time. So in the 1940s,
NASA was known as the NACA – they hadn’t
really got the space bit yet. And they began
to hire women. So one of the first women they
hired was Mary Golda Ross. Now she was the
first woman engineer to work at Lockheed Martin,
and she was the only Native American engineer
to work at Lockheed Martin during the Space Race.
She was hired in 1942, and she went on to
work on engineering systems that went into
flyby missions to Mars and Venus as well as
for human space flight.
So at the same time, NASA also began to hire
women to work as computers, just as Harvard
had done and Greenwich had done. Now they
hired a lot of black women, and the reason
for this, I bet you’ll be able to guess,
is because they could be paid less to do the same job.
So at this point, NASA was segregated, the
NACA was segregated, like most places in America.
And it remained that way until 1958 when it
became NASA. Now, to give you some context,
this is three years after Rosa Parks refused
to give up her bus seat, and seven years before
all black people in America could vote. I
find that shocking every time I read that.
So black women that joined the NACA under
these circumstances are people like
Annie Easley. She was a rocket scientist, and she
was involved in the launch of a number of
space shuttles, military software, weather
satellites, all sorts of things.
Christine Darden, who was an American mathematician,
an engineer and expert in sonic booms and
supersonic flight.
And of course, Mary Jackson, Dorothy Vaughan,
and Katherine Johnson, who I think you might
know from the ‘Hidden Figures’ film.
Now all of these women worked on the flight
trajectories and launch windows for Project
Mercury, which was America’s first human
spaceflight program. So this included the
flights of Alan Shepard, who was the first
American in space in 1961, and John Glenn
who was the first American to orbit the Earth
the following year. As well as of course for
Apollo 11, which put two people on the Moon
in 1969.
Now, the man who devised the training program for
the male astronauts in the Mercury project,
he was very interested in how women would fare
in this project, and he privately funded a
project that put female pilots and fighter
pilots under the same training. Funnily enough,
the women did exceptionally well. 13 women
passed I believe it was about 9 for the men,
but I’ll have to check that.
One of these women was Jerrie Cobb, and she ranked in the top 2% of all astronauts, regardless of gender.
Unfortunately, this was a private project
and NASA wasn’t taking it that seriously,
and it was cancelled before any of the women
could go into space.
Cobb left NASA a few years later, and she
left to become a humanitarian and pioneer
really, she worked for the next forty years
or so, as a solo pilot delivering aid to people
in indigenous tribes in the Amazon.
So, the first woman that did get into space
was a Soviet woman, Valentina Tereshkova.
Now she was an amateur skydiver before she
trained to become a cosmonaut in 1962.
This included weightless flights, fighter jet flights,
and 120 parachute jumps.
She ended up orbiting the Earth 48 times over
three days during 1963, putting in more time
in space than all the male American astronauts
who had flown before her combined.
Unfortunately, the female cosmonaut program
was cancelled when people went to the Moon.
Both countries then turned their attention
to space stations, where they could conduct
long-term experiments on life.
NASA developed Skylab in 1973. But the Soviet’s
at the same time developed the Salyut program,
and this run until 1986 when Mir took over.
Mir was then superseded by the International
Space Station, and as you know, this is a
joint project between NASA, sorry, America,
Russia, and lots of other countries. The European Space Agency is involved and obviously that’s part of us.
It was funded until, sorry, it is funded until 2024,
we obviously hope it will go on a lot longer than that.
So the second woman in space and the first
woman to enter a space station was
Svetlana Savitskaya in 1982. So when she arrived at
the space station, her colleague ‘jokingly’
he says, he presented her with an apron and
told her "to get to work".
She went to space again two years later, when
she became the first woman to perform a spacewalk,
she welded metals in space for over three
hours.
The third woman in space was American, 
Sally Ride. Now Ride trained for her PhD at Stanford
in 1978. She joined NASA that year, and she
devised the robotic arm that’s on the space
shuttle and became the first woman in space
to use this.
Ride was the youngest American astronaut, she
still is, she launched at 32 years old,
she’s also the only openly known LGBT+ astronaut.
This wasn’t known until after she died,
when it was revealed in her obituary that she’d
been in a same sex relationship for over 27 years.
Ride went into space the following year on
a mission that had two women involved.
The second woman was Kathryn Sullivan,
she was a geologist, and became the first
American woman to perform a spacewalk. She
was followed by Anna Lee Fisher the same year.
And NASA made some crazy videos in the 80s,
so I’ve got this video I’m going to show
you now of Kathryn Sullivan and Anna Lee Fisher,
and this was filmed just before they went
into space, asking them why they want to be
astronauts, so I’m just going to play this
for you now.
“I never aimed for the space program as
such. I, all I ever thought about was that
nothing is worth doing unless you were willing
to do what was needed to do the job well.
Self-discipline, I think is the top, the most
important factor. I think it’s also important
to realise the responsibility each person
has towards all the other people. Waxing philosophical,
I think we show each other many many lessons
just in day to day life, and we can learn
a lot from each other. We can give a lot to
each other. And that will only be, that will
only reach its highest point if each of us
individually tries to do the best we can.
That’s true for a high-school exam or a
PhD or being an astronaut.
You can’t just do it for yourself. It does count.”
“The space program meets my particular academic
needs. It gives me something that’s intellectually
challenging, also physically challenging,
but much more importantly, I think that man
needs something to dream about. We’ve explored our world fairly thoroughly. I realise that the oceans
are remaining, they make up 3 quarters of
our world. But there’s really just two frontiers
left, the ocean and space, and I’d like
to be part of that effort.”
Wow. So the first British person in space, was Helen
Sharman, a chemist. She was the first woman
to go to the Mir space station in 1991.
Mae Jemison became the first black woman in
space the next year in 1992.
She was a medical doctor working for the Peace
Corps before she joined NASA.
And her colleague here, Sharon McDougle, was
her spacesuit technician. And she now manages
a team that provides spacesuits for NASA.
So, women began to get a few more rights around
this time, in other fields as well as space flight.
The Royal Astronomical Society presented 
Vera Rubin with its gold medal in 1996.
This is 170 years after the previous woman, 
Caroline Herschel.
Yeah.
Rubin was one of the first women in the world
to be allowed to use high-calibre telescopes.
She measured the speed of things in the Galaxy,
and her results were used to show that the
Galaxy is probably made up of dark matter.
Scientists still don’t know what dark matter is.
It’s incredibly important.
The Royal [Astronomical] Society gave three
more gold medals, two in 2005,
one to Margaret Burbidge, which she shared with her husband, and one for Carole Jordan,
and in 2017 to Michele Dougherty.
Margaret Burbidge used to sneak into Mount
Wilson Observatory, and that’s how she could
use high-calibre telescopes in the 1950s.
She used to pretend to be her husband’s assistant.
Because of this, she was able to co-develop
the theory known as stellar nucleosynthesis
– so this shows how elements are made in
stars through nuclear fusion. This was really
important because people didn’t know at
the time how stars were fuelled. If they were
fuelled by something like burning, like petrol,
then it would only last, the Sun would only
last for about 7000 years. So you can see
how that’s a bit of a concern.
So, yeah, that was amazing.
So Carole Jordan became the first [female] president of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1994.
She was the 90th president overall. She was followed by three male presidents and then
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, and Kathryn Whaler. Since then, there have been seven other male presidents
and again, this is pretty much reflective of where we are in the world right now.
