Women in Science

More Female Scientists.

The number of female scientists increased substantially in the 1930s, rising approximately 320 percent beyond what it was in the early 1920s yet remaining low in relation to the number of men who earned degrees in the sciences. A 1938 survey listed a total of 1,726 women scientists, excluding the medical sciences. The largest numbers in 1938 were spread over zoology (281), psychology (277), and botany (256), while the lowest were in engineering (8), anthropology (29), and astronomy (36). The statistics, however, only indicate the number of female scientists who actually got jobs, as opposed to those who had trained in those fields but got by on various grants. How widely a scientific field was taught, in addition, was likely to influence the accessibility of the field to women. Female zoologists graduated from 105 different institutions, while the sixty-three physicists came from some thirty-three schools....

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