April 2022, ScientificAmerican.com 35cut a piece of paper into the shape of a woman
with a skirt and pasted it on a bathroom door,
creating the Hale’s first ladies’ room.
Rubin was extraordinary, but her work con-
ditions were dead standard. All women astron-
omers in her world—those earning doctorates between the mid-
1950s and the mid-1980s—had the same stories, which discon-
certingly often mention bathrooms. The women were not
admitted, were not allowed, built careers around their families,
developed thick shells impervious to aggression and were almost
completely isolated. Their best bet was to blend in with the male
culture of astronomy. Margaret Burbidge—Ph.D. 1943, co-discov-
erer of the formation of the universe’s chemical elements,
awarded the National Medal of Science and elected to the NAS—
refused the women-only Annie Jump Cannon Award because she
thought women should be discriminated neither against nor for.
A woman astronomer in Rubin’s world was so alone as to be vir-
tually sui generis —one of the few of her kind. Meg Urry, Israel
Munson professor of physics and astronomy at Yale University,
says that for her, Rubin was an “existence-proof.”
But in the 1960s and 1970s a series of court
decisions, affirmative-action policies, laws and
executive orders mandated that universities no
longer exclude women and minorities for either
study or employment. By the time Urry got her
Ph.D. in 1984, some constraints on Rubin’s world were illegal, and
others were publicly deplored.
By 1987 Urry was working at the Space Telescope Science Insti-
tute (STScI) on active galactic nuclei, unusually bright objects
accompanied by light-years-long jets. She found that a subset of
these objects were the same creature, eventually shown to be a super-
massive black hole embedded in a galaxy and sending out jets. STScI
was then only six years old, and of the first 60 scientists it hired, 59
were men. In 1992 Urry organized a series of conferences, eventu-
ally run by the American Astronomical Society (AAS), on women
in astronomy. That year’s meeting was held in Baltimore. The result-
ing advisory, called the Baltimore Charter, pointed out that as long
as women were in charge of familial life, their careers were going
to look different from men’s. It recommended, among other things,
“swift and substantial action” against sexual harassers and imple-SARAH HÖRST, a planetary
scientist at Johns Hopkins
University, studies
atmospheric chemistry.Photograph by Amanda Andrade-Rhodes