Rosalyn Yalow urged the world to use women's talents

Person: Rosalyn Yalow
Lived: 1921–2011
Field: Medical Physics
From: American

The story

Rosalyn Yalow had faced doubt throughout her career simply because she was a woman. Graduate schools turned her down, and one admissions office told her frankly that as a Jew and a woman she would never get a job in physics. She took a secretarial job while she waited for a chance. At Illinois, when she earned an A- in a laboratory course, the head of the physics department remarked that it confirmed women did not do well at laboratory work. Later, at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital, she ignored a policy requiring pregnant women to stop working at five months, and she was back in the laboratory a week after her son was born.

In December 1977 she was in Stockholm to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing radioimmunoassay. By tradition one laureate responds at the Nobel banquet on behalf of all the prizewinners, and Yalow was chosen. She suggested that perhaps she had been selected because there was one obvious way in which she differed from the others, and she used the moment to speak directly about women and equality of opportunity.

Addressing the students in the audience, she pointed out that women were represented among them roughly in proportion to their numbers, yet not among the world's scientists, scholars and leaders. No objective testing, she said, had revealed differences in talent large enough to explain the gap. It was due in large part to social and professional discrimination. She observed that a significant fraction of people, including women, still believed that a woman belonged exclusively in the home and should not aspire to achieve more than men, particularly her husband.

She did not expect full equality of opportunity to come quickly. But she urged women to believe in themselves, to match their aspirations with competence, courage and determination, and to feel a personal responsibility to ease the path for those who came after them. Her conclusion became one of her most quoted lines: "The world cannot afford the loss of the talents of half its people if we are to solve the many problems which beset us."

Yalow kept her distance from women's organisations, but she took seriously the responsibility she felt the prize had given her. Twenty years later, speaking to girls at a Take Your Daughter to Work Day event, she said the Nobel Prize had obliged her to help women become more interested in science and reach their full potential.