A little tea, a little chat

I read a review of this recently which kicked off:

Ruby Payne-Scott is not a household name in Australia, but she should be. She was an essential part of the small group of scientists who at the Division of Radiophysics in Sydney in the years after the Second World War began the science of radio astronomy. Their work provided such a great foundation that today Australia is recognised internationally as one of the leaders in the field.

A patently idiotic thing to say, that first sentence. No scientists in Australia are household names other than Einstein and a couple of pop science writers with good marketing mechanisms like Hawking and Dawkins. If Payne-Scott were remembered especially, this would be for the patronising reason that she is female and is therefore especially notable for doing nothing more than a man would do. Correct me if I'm wrong. If a whole bunch of you write in with the names of important radio astronomers you regularly chat about over breakfast but haven't heard of this one, I'll take it all back.

I've been wondering too, if there was a period where female scientists got lucky through the timing of the second world war. Payne-Scott was one of a group of sixty scientists recruited by the CSIRO to do important war work and it included other women like Joan Freeman who went on to become the first woman awarded The Rutherford Medal. You won't have heard of her either but nor should you have. She was just another world-class scientist and you haven't really heard of any of the male ones either.

But whether or not this might have been a lucky break for them - I wonder if they were better off career wise than female scientists whose working life began just after WWII - on the way in they were certainly put in difficult positions.

In Australia it was almost impossible to study physics as girls and so Joan Freeman and probably also Ruby, snuck into night lectures with the precarious permission of the teachers: stay, but hide if any inspectors come in.

There is a fascinating radio discussion of which you can find the transcript here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s1010849.htm. I will just quote from it on another difficulty women faced:

She was hired as a physicist. The CSIRO had been hiring women since it was organized in the late 1920's, but it also almost entirely hired women as typistes, (with an ‘es’ on the end) or as librarians. And again these women would be doing scientific work but their jobs would be classified as “women’s jobs”. And I mean that seriously, because in war the Women’s Employment Board was set up to give women working in men's jobs equal pay. And women who were doing scientific work for the CSIRO but who were classified as librarians or as typists or a laboratory assistant were deemed to be doing women's work and so not eligible for the equal pay. But Ruby wasn't. She was hired in a man's job and so was eligible for equal pay and got it during the war. Interestingly enough, when she was hired Taffy Bowen, the head of the division then, after about 3 months wrote a kind of memorandum on probationary employees saying "Well, she's a bit loud and we don't think she's quite what we want and she may be a bit unstable, but we'll let her continue and see how she works out." And of course, she worked out great.

Still, I think you can make too much of these obstacles. Men face obstacles too. Male scientists - I imagine, at least - had to fight battles along the way for access and education. A lot of scientists in precarious jobs right now would probably kill for a job as a librarian that let them practise their craft. These girls did fight and struggle, but anybody at the top of their profession, as these were, do, don't they?

A few links for more detail on Payne-Scott:

http://www.sydneyobservatory.com.au/2010/under-the-radar-the-first-woman-in-radio-astronomy-ruby-payne-scott-by-wm-goss-and-richard-x-mcgee-published-by-springer-verlag-berlin-heidelberg-2010-%E2%80%93-book-review/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Payne-Scott

http://www.springerlink.com/content/g4260u52362un6u1/

The goodreads link for Freeman's autobiography on her life in physics is: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2917710.A_Passion_for_Physics.