In some respects, things are getting worse, not better, for women in science. Positive measures need to be taken for progress towards genuine equality of opportunity.

An early skirmish in the history of women and the Royal Society was the proposal for the Fellowship of the physicist and engineer Hertha Ayrton, in 1902. This was not accepted, following Counsel’s opinion that she could not be a Fellow because she was a married woman (and the position of unmarried women was very doubtful). If the Society wished to admit women it should apply for a supplemental charter, which would be granted, given the support of a sufficient proportion of the Fellows. In 1906 Hertha Ayrton received the Hughes medal for original discovery in the physical sciences, 50 years ahead of the Society’s next award of a medal to a woman. In 1919 the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act removed legal barriers to the admission of women by bodies governed by charter. In the debate on the Bill, Martin Conway, Member of Parliament for the United Universities and a Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries, raised an amendment specifying membership of the learned societies. This was opposed by the Solicitor-General, who declared that learned societies refusing to elect qualified women members would be acting in opposition to the will of the House of Commons and the intentions of the Government, and could be dealt with when their subsidies came before Parliament under the Civil Service Vote (not that they were). The Antiquaries elected women Fellows from 1920, as did the Chemical Society. At the Royal Society, no woman was proposed again until 1943.

A notable incident in the history of women and the Royal Society was the proposal in 1902 of the physicist, Hertha Ayrton, as a candidate for the Fellowship. Her certificate seems to have been the first in the history of the Society to be submitted in favour of a woman, and 41 years were to elapse before the next. In 1906 she received the Society’s Hughes medal, which is awarded annually for original discovery in the physical sciences, for her work on the electric arc, and on sand ripples, and she is still the only woman to have received this medal. Hertha Ayrton 1-5 was born as Phoebe Sarah Marks, the third of eight children of a Jewish watchmaker and jeweller of Petworth, Sussex, who had emigrated from Poland to escape the pogroms. He died when she was seven, leaving his pregnant wife and seven children (six sons) in poverty. Mrs Marks held that women needed a better not worse education than men, because ‘women have the harder battle to fight in the world’. With some self-sacrifice she allowed the nine-year-old Sarah to go to London to live with her aunt Marion Hartog, who ran a school.

We celebrate 50 years of women Fellows of the Royal Society of London in 1995, at a time when the position and progress of women in science are under active discussion. Last year the Office of Science and Technology published the report ‘The Rising Tide’ which discusses the low survival rate of women in science and engineering into positions of seniority and influence. A Hansard Society Commission report, ‘Women at the Top’, has catalogued the dearth of women in the upper reaches of public life: in Parliament, government and the judiciary, in corporate management, and in the universities, the media and the trade unions. There was no formal exclusion nor indeed any mention of women in the original charters and statutes of the Royal Society. One woman appears in the early histories of the Society, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who paid a visit to the Society in 1667 at her own request. Thomas Birch describes the experiments that Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke performed for her, and Samuel Pepys records that she was ‘full of admiration’ ( Diary , 30 May 1667). She was a prodigious writer, the first Englishwoman to encompass natural philosophy as well as drama, stories, biography, essays, orations and poetry. She was greatly interested in science, which she picked up from her husband William Cavendish, whose tutor was Thomas Hobbes, from her brother-in-law, Charles Cavendish, and from her brother John Lucas, who was an original Fellow of the Society. She was indignant that her own education was so poor.