Against the Odds - John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin ****

The number of women working in STEM subjects has expanded dramatically, but as John and Mary Gribbin make clear, in the history of science this is a very recent occurrence. Here, they bring us the stories of 12 women, from Eunice Newton Foote, born in 1819, to Vera Rubin, born in 1928 - effectively covering nearly 200 years in that Rubin died as recently as 2016.

There are some names that will already be familiar from popular science histories (and deservedly so). You will find, for instance, Dorothy Hodgkin and Rosalind Franklin represented. But there are plenty like Foote that few will have come across, including Inge Lehmann, Chien-Sung Wu and Lucy Slater. While arguably Foote is there primarily to demonstrate the difficulties she faced (her discovery of an aspect of greenhouse gas behaviour was independently bettered within weeks), the rest have all made significant discoveries or developments against the odds and often missed out the recognition the deserved. The most prominent obvious omission from the book is Jocelyn Bell Burnell (perhaps because she is not dead or because she wrote the foreword).

Lehmann, for example discovered the inner solid core of the Earth, Barbara McClintock discovered how genes turn on and off, and Lise Meitner (one of a number of women whose lack of a Nobel Prize is misogyny at its worst) explained the process of nuclear fission. Apart from the achievements, what comes through strongly is just how awful things were in the early days. Labs tended, for instance, to only have male toilets and workarounds were often grim. There's a mind-boggling comment from the experience of mathematical genius Emmy Noether, describing why women weren't allowed to lecture, as a woman 'is unsuitable for regular instruction of our students because of the phenomena connected with the female organism'.

I am giving the book four stars both for introducing unfamiliar figures and the enjoyable potted histories of their work and the challenges they faced. The only problem with this kind of book as far as the description of the actual science is concerned is that fitting twelve varied topics in makes the coverage of the science itself distinctly summary - it would have been great to have had a bit more depth, but there is an inevitable compromise. Even so, these are intriguing stories and the book deserves a wide audience.

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Review by Brian Clegg - See all Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly email free here