Letters: January 2019

We would like to draw Chemistry World readers’ attention to our project. We aim to carry out a critical evaluation of the gender of scientists in Irish and British secondary school chemistry textbooks, in order to identify whether there is unconscious bias which diminishes the participation of women in chemistry.

Interest in this topic has arisen due to student responses to the question ‘Can you name any women in science?’ during six secondary school visits for talks, and Women in Science wikithons in the past year. We found that students struggled to identify women scientists (let alone chemists), defaulting to Marie Curie and maybe Ada Lovelace or Rosalind Franklin. In the UK, very few students are aware of Dorothy Hodgkin and the fact she is a British female Nobel prize-winning chemist. Similarly, chemistry textbooks in Ireland do not mention Kathleen Lonsdale’s name at all in the story of benzene.