It was 8 March 2001. My high school chemistry teacher—a smart and cheery man with an incredible passion for his job—entered the class holding a picture of Maud Menten and said “Textbooks that deal with chemical thermodynamics and kinetics [for that was the subject we were going through] contain almost exclusively gentlemen. This is not fair. Today it is International Women’s Day, and I’m going to talk to you about Maud Menten.”
Until that moment, I had never been consciously aware that the scientific literature was so male dominated. It is something you took for granted, a culture you grow up into and that promoted most women as neither interested in nor good at science. Indeed, this preconception was one of the reasons to feel I didn’t fit within the typical stereotype of ‘girl’ that was and is so popular and praised in Italy.
A few weeks after the Maud Menten talk, our biology teacher raised with us her concerns about the potential failures that might be faced by a girl who enrols into a science course. She said she was lucky she managed to teach at a high school. Some of her friends, who hold degrees in physics and in chemistry, were either unemployed or working as casual shop assistants at the time. She shared that she perceived that our problem as women was that we decided to have children, and even if we didn’t, we potentially could. This, in her opinion, was enough for employers not to hire women.
A heart-breaking story from direct experience. One can imagine the confusion that this could have caused in the head of a 19-year-old who is about to enrol at university. While being motivated to follow exclusively my own advice and doing it my way, I became aware that as a woman, there was a fair chance that I had to work twice as hard than a hypothetical male counterpart to achieve the same results.
The thought of Maud Menten, of how she made it to be remembered so well in a discipline that has forgotten most women’s contributions, made me feel hopeful. The words of Rita Levi Montalcini—1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine—were also a good mantra I used to repeat to myself to get through episodes of bullyism, sexism and exclusion: “The women who changed the world never needed to show anything but their own intelligence”.
This is exactly what Maud Menten did. Her work laid the groundwork for modern drug therapy, biochemistry and histochemistry. She had a diverse range of interests including pathology, cancer cells and surface tension. She characterised bacterial toxins that were used in a successful immunisation program against scarlet fever and worked on the first electrophoretic separation of blood haemoglobin proteins. All this while serving as a clinical pathologist at Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh.
I read her biography recently, and the author described her as a petite dynamo of a woman who was unstoppable. I saw so much of myself in her and it made her story even more fascinating to me. She wasn’t the most confident driver (just like me, though I’m not as hopeless as she was), she had a strong attitude for doing things her own way (like me) and a particular passion for languages and arts (like me, though I am not fluent in as many languages and my art pieces haven’t made it to an exhibition yet).
Two years after finishing high school, my path crossed with that of another unstoppable woman in science who became a role model. This time she was not a black and white picture from the past, but an Associate Professor of Physical Chemistry at the University of Torino, Carla Roetti. At some point, I ended up doing a PhD in the group she was part of.
Other than having pioneered the field of quantum chemistry through co-developing the first quantum mechanical code performing Hartree Fock on periodic systems using gaussian basis sets and implementing the exploitation of symmetry, Carla Roetti also managed to live a fascinating life and did not miss a chance to share her life-lessons and reflections with her students.
What I admired the most is the time she spent stopping by students and post-docs to deliver what she called “todays’ pill”. We were all so afraid of that moment, as we didn’t know what to expect. Most often it was a story about good coding practices, research ethics and integrity, or about the importance of team work and of respect and support between team members. But Carla also used to ask direct questions like “Do you know what women’s life was like before abortion and divorce were legalised?” followed by a story or her experience about that issue.
Whenever she spotted someone throwing an item in the wrong recycling bin, she would suddenly exclaim “do you want your children to grow up on a mountain of rubbish?” She used to hang flyers about holocaust, racism and discrimination around the Chemistry Department every year on January 27, and come desk by desk to drop a copy, just in case we missed looking at the walls.
As with most women in STEM, Carla was not immune from sexism, harassment, discrimination and exclusion. One day, she came with a book—a book of tabulated numbers that she derived and that served the theoretical chemistry community for at least a decade—where her name was spelt as masculine, and she told us the story behind that misspelling.
While on a contract at the University of Turin, she was offered a one-year position in the United States. Due to contractual obligations, she was allowed to move for only six months. The group of researchers in the United States made her feel as if they had very little expectations from Italians, and that the expectation was even lower for Italian women. Carla took their attitude as a challenge, moved to the United States and during those six months she delivered what was originally planned as a one-year job.
She said she worked 24/7 except for a weekend, during which she had the best of fun. When it came to publishing, the publisher saw ‘Carla’ and thought it was a typo as theoretical chemistry was no job for a woman, and her work was published under the name of ‘Carlo’. She used to say she couldn’t be bothered asking for a correction after copies had been distributed all over the world, but I see that her work is now digitalised and with the correct name.
The work environment has changed a lot since last century, where Maud Menten was promoted to professor only at the age of 69 and Carla Roetti was thought to be a man with a typo in his name. Many countries have walked a long way along the path of equity, diversity and inclusivity. However, slow career progression, poor management of career interruptions and part-time work by employers, salary gap, harassment, direct and indirect discriminations, and exclusion are still problems that most women in STEM experience while walking their way from early career to senior positions. We have come to an understanding of where our culture and bias come from, and there seems to be a genuine commitment to shaping where we want to go. Change, though, happens with actions, and the urgency now is in translating genuine intentions and good words into practical, effective actions.
© 2024 Australian Academy of Science
