Vera Rubin was a lifelong champion of women in science

Person: Vera Rubin
Lived: 1928–2016
Field: Astronomy
From: American

The story

Vera Rubin learned early that the road into astronomy was narrower for women. Born in Philadelphia in 1928 and raised in Washington, she graduated from Vassar in 1948 as the only astronomy graduate of her year. When she tried to enrol in Princeton's astronomy graduate programme, she was turned away because of her sex; Princeton kept that policy until 1975. At Georgetown, a Catholic university, she was once unable to meet her adviser in his office because women were not allowed in that part of the building.

Rather than accept such exclusion, she spent her career fighting it. In 1965 she became the first woman permitted to observe under her own name at the Palomar Observatory, where she famously taped a paper skirt onto the men's room sign. When she was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1981, she became only the second woman astronomer among its members, after her colleague Margaret Burbidge. The two pressed for more women to be elected to the academy, chosen for review panels and considered in academic searches. Rubin later called the low number of women elected each year the saddest part of her life.

Her campaigning reached well beyond the academy. National Geographic recalled that she would phone conference organisers to point out their lack of diverse speakers, and that she fought for women to be admitted to Washington's exclusive Cosmos Club. Carnegie Science noted that she even advised the Pope to have more women on his committee; she had been appointed to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in 1996.

Mentoring was central to how she worked. The Jewish Women's Archive records her remark that she was available twenty-four hours a day to women astronomers. In her 1997 book Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters she set out three working assumptions: that no problem in science can be solved by a man but not by a woman, that half of the world's brains are in women, and that permission to do science has too often been given only to men.

Colleagues such as Sandra Faber and Neta Bahcall described her as a guiding light for women who wanted both families and careers in astronomy, and the astronomer Rebecca Oppenheimer has credited her mentorship as important early on. When the National Academy of Sciences gave her its James Craig Watson Medal in 2004, the citation praised both her observations of dark matter and her generous mentoring of young astronomers, men and women alike.

Why it matters

Rubin's advocacy and mentoring helped open observatories, academies and conference programmes to women, and many of the astronomers she encouraged now lead the field themselves.