A fruitful field for women: Collective biography of women biochemists in the 20th Century

Since the 1970's, accessing the 'untapped' market of women's labour was a solution to perceived skills shortages in scientific fields. Alison Phipps (2008) outlines over 150 individual initiatives aimed at addressing the issue in the thirty preceding years. Despite these efforts, women make up just under 13% of the STEM workforce. Whilst women are underrepresented in all areas of UK science, the disparity is least in the life sciences and fields allied to medicine.

The absence of detailed historical investigations into the lives and careers of women scientists means that the explanations for these patterns frequently lack a detailed empirical basis. This project aims to answer these questions using oral history and collective biography to provide social historical contexts to women's scientific employment. This project will explore what led women to take up and sustain careers in biological sciences, how they balanced their personal and professional lives, and how they understand their own achievements.


The success of British women in biochemistry makes the field a rich case study for this investigation. When exploring causal factors of women's excellence in this field, several conjectures can be made. Biochemistry, as a new field, may have been more open to women than the more established fields of chemistry and physics. Advances in biomedicine led to the uptake of laboratory screening methods in hospitals, increasing the need for a new workforce. Research topics in biochemistry (such nutrition and dietetics) may have been perceived as more suitable to women, or seen to be more identified with 'feminine' skills and attributes. Additionally, several prominent male innovators in the field were particularly supportive of women. The basis of these theories, and the extent of their validity will provide the framework of investigation, as well as the exploration of the influence of the two world wars, and role of social and professional networks.
The main methodologies used will be prosopography and oral history, contextualised within contemporary ideas in social network and feminist theory.

The interdisciplinary nature of the field makes for ill-defined disciplinary boundaries, therefore, scope will initially be limited to women authors in the Biochemical Journal from 1906-1975 (from the appointment of the first UK Chair of Biochemistry until the enactment of the Sex Discrimination Act).

Collective biography surmounts the limits of selective elite biography which currently dominates the literature. The use of prosopography will refine current narratives which lionise a few highly successful, but unrepresentative, individuals and make use of the often-limited volume of archival records of women scientists. Employment and alumna records, institutional and personal archives will be used to generate a prosopographical database. Interrogation of this database will identify trends in the social and educational backgrounds, marital patterns and career trajectories. This will identify themes and patterns in the lives and careers of women biochemists and to place them in the context of professional employment for women.

The collection of at least 20 oral history interviews will allow the exploration of how women scientists understand their own careers and the factors that shaped them as well as placing their professional lives in the context of their private lives and personal relationships. My previous research found instances of discord between the careers of some women biochemists and the normalised structures of scientific careers, and as such, a focus of the interviews will be to examine women's own understanding of their careers and the role of agency in determining markers of success.

This presents a novel use of oral history in the history of science (which predominantly focuses on internalist narratives), and will cast new light on the social and intellectual roots of women's involvement in the field.