Lise Meitner became Germany's first woman physics professor

Person: Lise Meitner
Lived: 1878–1968
Field: Physics
From: Austrian-Swedish

The story

Lise Meitner earned her doctorate in physics at the University of Vienna in 1906 and moved to Berlin in 1907, hoping to learn from the great theorist Max Planck. Planck, who opposed admitting women to universities in general, made an exception and allowed her to attend his lectures. Through the physicist Heinrich Rubens she was introduced to the chemist Otto Hahn, who was looking for a physicist to work with on radioactivity.

The arrangement was difficult at first. Women were not yet admitted to universities in Prussia, and the head of the chemistry institute, Emil Fischer, allowed Meitner to work only in a former woodworking shop in the basement, which had its own outside entrance. She could not enter the rest of the building, and had to use the toilet at a restaurant down the street. When women were admitted to Prussian universities the following year, Fischer lifted the restrictions.

In 1912 Hahn and Meitner moved to the new Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Chemistry, where she at first worked without pay as a guest. Planck then appointed her as his assistant at the Institute for Theoretical Physics, her first paid post, which made her the first female scientific assistant in Prussia. In 1913 she became an associate of the institute, and in January 1917 she was made head of her own physics section.

Prussia granted women the right of habilitation, the qualification to lecture at university, in 1920. Meitner received hers in 1922, the first woman to do so in physics in Prussia. Having already published more than 40 papers, she was excused from writing a thesis but gave an inaugural lecture on problems of cosmic physics. In 1926 she was appointed an extraordinary professor at the University of Berlin, the first woman university professor of physics in Germany.

Her section grew, and scientists from Germany and around the world came to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to work under her supervision. In 1933 the Nazi regime stripped her of her university teaching post, and in 1938 she was forced to flee. Today statues and buildings in Berlin honour her, and lecture series run by the German and Austrian physical societies celebrate leading women physicists in her name.

Why it matters

Meitner showed that a woman could lead at the very top of physics, and the barriers she broke in Berlin helped open academic science to the generations of women who followed.