![\"This](\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/0\/03\/Lise_Meitner_%281878-1968%29%2C_lecturing_at_Catholic_University%2C_Washington%2C_D.C.%2C_1946.jpg\/400px-Lise_Meitner_%281878-1968%29%2C_lecturing_at_Catholic_University%2C_Washington%2C_D.C.%2C_1946.jpg\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\nIf you have never seen the \u2018zombie Marie Curie<\/a>\u2019 xkcd cartoon I\u2019d encourage you to take a look. In it Marie Curie says \u2018I wish they\u2019d get over me\u2019<\/em> and enumerates a couple of other key women scientists who don\u2019t get the same name recognition (specifically Lise Meitner<\/a>, whose photograph is at the top, and Emmy Noether<\/a>). Cartoon Marie also highlights that choosing her \u2013 or any female scientist \u2013 as a role model makes no sense if young girls think that trying to be like her is what it takes to become successful, as opposed to hard work and passion for their chosen field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The idea of a simple narrative of a chosen life to exhort\nfuture generations receives much traction. Kids books, books for really young\nkids at that, now tell the stories of such hero(in)es. Marie Curie is one of\nthe women featured in the Little\nPeople, Big Dreams: Women in Science<\/a> series, a series which bizarrely also\nfeatures aviator Amelia\nEarhart<\/a> alongside Ada\nLovelace<\/a>. (I can think of other more convincing historical women in science\nwho would sit more comfortably in place of Earhart, such as Mary Somerville<\/a>, or Maria Goeppert Mayer<\/a>;\nor indeed Lise Meitner or Emmy Noether.) It is clearly desirable to give young\nchildren the idea that scientists don\u2019t have to be male and I guess this should\nstart young.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Narratives are a convenience but can be dreadfully\nmisleading. At Churchill College this past week, as we celebrated the life of\nLise Meitner with an all-day symposium, we finished the day off with the\nperformance of a play about the lives of Marie Curie, Lise Meitner and Hedy\nLamarr<\/a> (yes, Hedy\nLamarr<\/a> the film-star described as the most beautiful woman in the world but\nwho also had a role to play in Bluetooth technology, even if she never made a\npenny out of her invention). The one-woman play, written and directed by Sandra Sch\u00fcddekopf<\/a> and\nacted by Anita Zieher<\/a>, began\nwith Marie Curie bemoaning the way her life had become such a clich\u00e9, how a simplistic\nrags-to-Nobel Prizes narrative hid reality and misled, a story-line that in\nessence expands on the xkcd Zombie Marie Curie cartoon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lise Meitner\u2019s life will not be such a familiar tale as Curie\u2019s, but has its own compelling twists. A female physicist growing up in Vienna when it was practically impossible for her to get an education, who moved to Berlin where state law initially made it impossible for her to get paid employment in a university or to teach, and a Jew by birth who only just fled Nazi Germany in time and subsequently had to forego serious experimental work in her exile in Sweden, it is a tale to move and to marvel at. She accomplished so much despite it all. But, there again, to try to compress her life into a sentence or two is to mislead. She had many supporters of great eminence, and rightly so, but was ultimately shafted by one of them (Otto Hahn<\/a>) who had been a close friend and colleague for many years. She, like several other women, is perhaps best known for not getting a Nobel Prize when Hahn did, but what sort of testament is that? She should be remembered for what she did (explain nuclear fission for one thing, not a mere bagatelle), not what she wasn\u2019t offered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Narratives are a convenient shorthand, but as devices to\ninspire the next generation? I\u2019m not so sure. Narratives of the great and good\nmay only serve to make a career in science seem unobtainable. Who wants to\nspend their life in a cold shed sifting through pitchblende? Or be driven out\nof one\u2019s job because of the Nazis? Historians of science rightly deplore the \u2018grand\nman of science\u2019 approach \u2013 be it Newton or Einstein \u2013 and I think we should\nequally shun the grand woman of science. But, without the shorthand of the\nnarrative how can we inspire future generations?<\/p>\n\n\n\n I suspect there are two different strands conflated here. There is the \u2018let\u2019s inspire with the great and good\u2019 theme and the \u2018let\u2019s normalise the idea of women in science\u2019 one. Both, I suspect, could be better served \u2013 particularly for very young children \u2013 by simply making it possible for \u2018people\u2019 to do \u2018stuff\u2019. I was brought up on the generation of books in which Peter climbed a tree and Jane stood at the bottom looking impressed; where Jane made the tea and Peter talked to the nice policeman about the naughty robber he had caught. We maybe have moved on a little (look, we now have a female Dr Who: progress!) but research<\/a> shows that even in kids\u2019 books about animals the male of the species dominates. That embedded cultural unconscious bias is then imbibed by the children; action men (or animals) are, well, male.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maybe my great grandchildren \u2013 it hasn\u2019t happened in time for my grandchildren \u2013 will be brought up on a diet of books where gender (including non-binary) is no longer linked to specific roles but we are as likely to find a male nurse as a female astronomer in books. That books about Lise Meitner or Marie Curie inform us about amazing scientists whose personal lives presented challenges and yet they managed to rise above these, but in which we are not constantly told to think \u2018they were women\u2019. Reading biographies is always interesting, not least for reminding us how fashions and customs have changed. But we should recall the cartoon\u2019s \u2018I wish they\u2019d get over me<\/em>\u2019 meme and simply expose the young to stories about people, with scientists, nurses, monsters and indeed stay-at-home parents evenly distributed between the genders, so that a 5 year old does not already think nurse equates with female and scientist (or monster) with male.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If you have never seen the \u2018zombie Marie Curie\u2019 xkcd cartoon I\u2019d encourage you to take a look. In it Marie Curie says \u2018I wish they\u2019d get over me\u2019 and enumerates a couple of other key women scientists who don\u2019t … Continue reading