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This article aims to question the widely accepted idea that female university students in Spain have, in the past, tended to opt for degrees in the field of humanities. Based on an analysis of the official statistics that are currently available, the paper demonstrates that Spanish female university students showed a clear preference for scientific studies, first medicine and later pharmacy. This pattern was not affected by Franco’s regime and remained stable until the great transformation of Spanish universities during the 1960s. Finally, the paper argues that the basic reasons for this preference for the scientific field were equal access to the prestigious male baccalaureate curriculum, which was a characteristic of the Spanish model for incorporating women into secondary education, and the uneven prestige of the professions to which the degrees provided access. The conclusion drawn is that, historically, pharmacy was the most common professional career pursued by female university graduates in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the years around 1900, more women were benefiting from a university education and using it as a pathway to acquiring research expertise and contributing to the development of scientific knowledge. Although numbers were small compared with men, it is clear that the idea of a female researcher was no longer an oddity. As illustrated by biographies and an analysis of three fictional texts featuring a female scientist, the increasing visibility of women did little to challenge the masculine colouring of science. A dissonance can be identified between femininity and science, even in settings sympathetic to a woman’s scientific activities. Particular unease is discernible when women are placed within the material culture of the laboratory. The problem of a woman embodying scientific authority, especially at a time when science was professionalising and institutionalising, adds an additional layer of complexity to discussions about women, science and education in these years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: the belief that women and science, including mathematics and medicine, are incompatible has had a long and complex history and still often works to exclude women from and/or marginalise them in science. Purpose: this article will seek to explore gender and educational achievement through investigating how such gendered presumptions have persisted at various levels of science, despite perceptions of science itself changing over time and scientific studies expanding, differentiating and becoming professionalized. In particular, after a brief discussion of the historical debates on the provenance and lasting recurrence of gendered assumptions in science, it will try to discover how these prejudices affected the education of girls and women in England from c.1910 to c. 1939 and then, to widen the picture, make some comparison with the USA in the same period, although, necessarily in an article of this length, this analysis will be somewhat cursory. It will then bring the history up-to-date by examining the situation in England today. Sources of evidence:the article will proceed by using extensive local sources in case study research on Birmingham, by then the second largest English city. The comparisons with the situation in the USA in the same period and the examination of the present situation will be based largely on secondary sources. Main argument: factors of location, family background, supportive networks and greater educational, political and employment rights will be shown to have allowed some women to break through the barriers that hindered many from accessing or rising in science. Thus, it will be seen through the Birmingham example that there was a growing yet limited field of scientific practice for women, ordered by a gendered philosophy which routed them into specific areas. This picture was further permeated by class, wealth, identity, contacts, networks and location albeit this was modified by the scholarship system. Comparisons with the USA show that similar factors were present there, albeit in a different context. Twenty-first century sources indicate that on the one hand there is still gendered access and progress for females in science in England yet, on the other hand, there have been, and are at present, a number of initiatives seeking to overcome this. Conclusion: Even today, therefore, whatever sciences females do is affected by underlying gendered assumptions and structural power relationships which need to be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This paper explores the use of linguistic features characteristic of impersonal or personal style in scientific writing by female authors in the eighteenth century. Variables such as discipline, subject-matter and genre are used to assess the ways in which abstract thought and argumentation are expressed by women, given that, even when these works were accepted by the scientific establishment, such modes of expression were more typical of men and men's writing in the context of the Modern Age. Data from different genres and disciplines (History, Philosophy, Astronomy and Life Sciences) will be used in order to obtain more reliable findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the role of women as amanuenses in the history of British geology, noting the importance of their sketches and drawings. Artists noted include Mary Anning, Mary Buckland, and Mary Ann Mantell. Topics include cultural views on drawing and water-colour painting as women's pursuits, the creation of hand-coloured geological maps, and sketches of landscapes and fossils in palaeontological publications. It is said that drawings of fossils were used both in lectures and for communication between scientists by mail.