ABSTRACT
These are words from a woman chemist who, like many others, questions the competitive atmosphere and the all engulfing work in the top positions of a university science department. She is one of about 25 chemists and physicists interviewed by us in a follow up study of a mapping of women chemists and physicists in Sweden 1900-89 (Benckert and Staberg, 1994). We selected women to interview from different universities, different areas of chemistry and physics and of varying ages in order to explore the conditions of women chemists and physicists in the academy. The roots to our study lie in our own background. We both have an interest and an education in science, one with a preference for physics the other for chemistry; one of us did post-graduate studies and made a career in physics, the other left the university immediately after her graduation and came back much later, and is now in education. Together and also individually we have pursued our interest in questions of gender and science and the feminist critique of science. In an earlier study we looked at the careers of six very successful women scientists, born 1867-1920 (Benckert and Staberg, 1992). Four of the scientists in this study were Nobel prize winners and the two others were as eminent in the field; the oldest was Marie Curie and the youngest Rosalind Franklin. Findings worth mentioning in this context were the formal and informal resistance all these women met and the problems associated with being a woman and a scientist. For the older ones there was formal resistance concerning, for example, access to school or university positions, and all the women met different kinds of informal resistance during their careers. In this study, we stressed the importance of having the right husband-or none-and also the necessity of supportive colleagues. We also noted that the married women took a far greater part of the unpaid work for maintaining home and children than their husbands, a fact that influenced their careers.
