“In Part 4 of this historical series of articles, I am honoured to follow in the distinguished company of Peter Willett, Henry Rzepa and Johnny Gasteiger, all of whom had a significant influence on me during my progress in the path of cheminformatics. I started out as a synthetic organic chemist. When I matriculated at Oxford in Michaelmas 1964 the ratio of women to men Oxford undergrads in all subjects was 1:5. (At Cambridge it was 1:7, but Cambridge had only 2-3 women’s colleges then, while Oxford had five.) I was one of seven women in total from the five Oxford colleges who studied for chemistry Part I in 1964-1967. I don’t know how many men there were, but the number was certainly over 200. A great deal of progress has since been made as regards equality. On the Oxford undergraduate course in 2023 there are 421 men (57%) and 317 women (43%). There is also a web page about women in chemistry. Jonathan Goodman tells me that third years reading chemistry at Cambridge in Michaelmas 2023 are about 40% female.
I was at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, whose undergraduates were always addressed as ‘ladies’: hence the title of this article. One of my sons says that women have been the dark matter of science: they have always been there and are immensely important, but they have only recently been recognised. In 1964, when I went up to Oxford, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the first woman winner since the Curies early in the century. Historically, eight out of 191 chemistry Nobel Laureates have been women, but things are improving: five of the eight winning women were recognised in 2009 or later.”
Read the full text: RSC CICAG Newsletter Winter 2023-24, pages 46-50. (PDF)
Chemical Structure Association Trust 