Spotlight

Great Women of Science

The centenary of Suffrage Year has seen the role of women in a whole host of fields recognised and celebrated. Over the last 100 years, women have made important contributions to the development of science and technology in New Zealand, and various lecture series, seminars and publications have paid tribute to them this year.

Two years before women gained the vote, Emily Siedeberg became the first woman medical student in New Zealand. Unlike her counterparts overseas, she had little difficulty in entering medical school, and was the country's first woman medical graduate in 1896.

Siedeberg had her own private practice in Dunedin, gave anaesthetics at the Dental School and was the Superintendent of St Helen's Maternity Hospital from 1905 to 1938. She was pivotal in many women's organisations, and had a major impact on social reform and related legislation. With six of her women colleagues, Emily founded the New Zealand Medical Women's Association in 1921. The group continues to this day, part of an international network.

Getting a medical degree was one thing, earning a living was quite another, says Dr Robin Briant, a clinical reader in Auckland School of Medicine's Department of Pharmacology.

"A viable private practice was difficult and costly to establish. A few private practitioners made it -- Margaret Cruickshank in Waimate, for example. She died in the influenza epidemic and is one of the few medical women in the world remembered in a statue."

When specialisation began to create some full-time hospital jobs, women tended towards areas stereotypically appropriate for women's strengths: child psychology (Kathleen Todd), obstetrics (Doris Gordon and Emily Siedeberg) and nutrition (Muriel Bell). Women continue to gravitate towards these areas.

At the Auckland Medical School, the first medical woman professor was appointed this year, to the Postgraduate Chair of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (O&G). A woman has been appointed to the Chair of Paediatrics but is yet to take up her post. Two of the sub-Deans are women but only 14 of the rest of the academic staff are women doctors, eight of them in O&G and Paediatrics, notes Briant.

"What women have done in medicine, and done spectacularly if unglamorously, is fill the niches that are vital to good health care, but which do not attract either publicity or funds, " she says.

Funding, salaries and career advancement have been common problems for women in science, and form one theme in Lives with Science, a book profiling New Zealand women in science, to be published by the Museum of New Zealand. Victoria University researcher Paula Martin has taken a look at the tribulations and triumphs of ten of this country's senior scientists.

In 1957, when Vivienne Cassie Cooper began her research at the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in the US, she found that her PhD was less important that her gender.

"When I started at the Oceanographic Institute, I received a lower salary than a boy with a First Class Honours and no publications. I had six publications and a PhD. But I had a husband..." she recalls.

Despite this, Cooper continued her work on algae, becoming one of the country's leading experts. Her work on planktonic algae and diatoms was particularly admired, with much painstaking effort undertaken in the days before electron microscopes made identification of the tiny organisms considerably easier.

Following her retirement, Cooper continued to take an active interest in her field, working on the 1981 Tasman Bay slime growth, and currently acts as a Research Associate for Landcare Research.

"I love the algae and I try to think from the point of view of the algae themselves which most people don't do. They talk about endangered species but no one talks about endangered algae. No one talks, for instance, about the algae that die when they pour milk down the streams during a strike...I have continued in retirement because I feel there are too few people in New Zealand who are knowledgeable in this area."

One area of palaeontology which had no-one in it became the special preserve of Joan Wiffen. When she swapped her portrait painting night classes for a course on geology, Wiffen didn't realise that this would see the start of a 20-year passion for fossicking for fossils. One of her early encounters was with belemnites, long-extinct squids which left behind them a distinctive, bullet-shaped tailbone.

"There was a particular type of belemnite...that we hadn't found at our site so I thought I'd chisel out one of the small fossil belemnites to bring home to put with my collection, " recalls Wiffen.

"A certain professor who was part of the group came up and sort of leaned over my shoulder and said, `Ah, getting some pretty little rocks are you, dear?' (I don't think he actually called me dear) and my hair stood on end and I said, `No, I'm trying to get a specimen of Dimitobelus superstes because it's the only species of Dimitobelus we don't have at our site.' And he said, `Oh' and went back to the more accommodating members of the group."

The 70-year-old amateur palaeontologist has become best known as New Zealand's "dinosaur woman" for her startling discovery of the remains of land-based dinosaurs in New Zealand ["Our Jurassic Past", September 1993].

"I decided it was time to go out and find ourselves a dinosaur. In blissful ignorance at that time that New Zealand wasn't supposed to have dinosaurs, it seemed a good idea, " she says.

In her autobiography, Valley of the Dragons, Wiffen wrote of the excitement and joy of discovery.

"For me, collecting fossils, holding these ancient bones in my hands, studying to find out what they are, how the creatures they represent lived, has enabled me to reach back in time, to touch the past."

Wiffen has reached back millions of years; her contemporary, anthropologist Joan Metge, has a shorter reach, but one which she finds no less fascinating.

"I decided at 12 that I wanted to be an archaeologist. The more I was advised against it, the more I dug my toes in. At 15 a friend of my father's said to me, `Wouldn't you really be more interested in living people than dead ones, because living ones can talk back?' I thought that made good sense. It was the first argument that really budged me from my position. So then I decided I wanted to study anthropology at university, " says Metge.

Like many scientists, the need to understand formed the basis of Metge's interest in her field of study.

"There was something very wrong in relations between Maori and Pakeha. I wanted to understand that relationship. To do that I had to begin by understanding the Maori side because so often anything that was written about the Maori side was written from a Pakeha standpoint and I felt that there was a need to redress the information balance, " she says.

Her university career has seen Metge honoured for her work, starting with gaining the Hutchinson Medal for her PhD thesis in 1958. Medals, fellowships and various university positions followed, and Metge was made a Dame of the British Empire in 1987 for her academic and social contributions to society.

Few scientists of either gender achieve that distinction.