"Have you ever doubted your knowledge or expertise? Noticed, if you're a woman, that you receive less recognition than your male colleagues do, that your ideas were unheard in a discussion until they were echoed by a man - who then received credit for them? Have you observed a gendered division of labour in your workplace; a pay gap; gender, racial or class prejudices? Have you felt pressured to choose between being a wife, a mother and a scientist? Most women in science have."
"Soon after, he left her - pregnant and alone in a foreign land. To survive, she found work in the household of Edward Pickering, director of Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His wife, Lizzie Sparks Pickering, recognized Fleming's scientific aptitude. The observatory employed Fleming in 1881 as one of its 'computers' - a role only women could have, under the institution's strict gender division of labour."
Many women in science experience self-doubt, less recognition than male colleagues, interrupted credit when ideas are reiterated by men, gendered division of labour, pay gaps, and intersecting prejudices. Williamina Fleming emigrated from Scotland, was abandoned by her husband while pregnant, and obtained work in Edward Pickering's household. She became one of Harvard Observatory's women 'computers', performing calculations and spectral classifications under strict institutional gender roles. Fleming discovered spectral lines from a helium ion instrumental to extending Bohr's atomic model beyond neutral hydrogen, but the lines were named the 'Pickering series'. Fleming died in 1911.
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