‘She was right and they were wrong’: the female astronomers hidden by science’s male elite

Eighty-five years ago, several dozen eminent astronomers posed for a photograph outside the newly constructed McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis in Texas. All were men – with one exception. Half-concealed by a man in front of her, the face of a solitary woman can just be made out in the grainy black and white image.

This is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, whose impact on our understanding of the cosmos was profound. She showed stars were primarily made of hydrogen and helium, contradicting the scientific orthodoxy of the 1920s, which held that they were made of an array of elements. Her claims were suppressed and her work obscured, like her image on the McDonald Observatory photograph.

“You can see what she was up against from that picture taken in 1939,” said Meg Weston-Smith, a family friend of the Gaposhkins. “Astronomy, like so much else, was a man’s world.”

In the end, the ideas of Payne-Gaposchkin – who was born in Britain and married a Russian scientist, Sergei Gaposchkin – prevailed, though not without considerable opposition from male colleagues, as revealed in a new play, The Lightest Element , by Stella Feehily, opening this week at the Hampstead Theatre.

“Essentially she was up against a men’s club,” says Feehilly. “Astronomers, virtually all of them male, all agreed that the stars and the universe must be made of the same elements as we find on Earth. Being a woman and outside the group, she was free to be more radical in her thinking. She was right and they were wrong. The cosmos is 98% hydrogen and helium.”

Nor was Payne-Gaposchkin alone in being initially disparaged for being a female astronomer and only now being recognised for her brilliance. Annie Maunder and Alice Everett, who in the 19th century were among the first women to earn a living in astronomy, recently had asteroids named after them.

In addition, the biggest camera in the world – to be unveiled in Chile and used to image the entire visible sky every three to four nights beginning next year – has been named the Vera C Rubin Observatory. Rubin, who was American, played a critical role in revealing that our universe appears to be permeated with mysterious, undetectable particles. This is dark matter and it has played a key role in the evolution of the universe.

Like all female students at Cambridge until 1948, Maunder and Everett were not awarded degrees despite passing their examinations with honours; during her education and career, Rubin suffered widespread discrimination. Even after she acquired fame, she was blocked from using the great Palomar Observatory to continue her groundbreaking research because it had no bathrooms for women. Rubin’s “solution” was to tape a piece of paper in the shape of a skirt on top of the men’s symbol on the bathroom door.

“Rubin’s name regularly topped lists of potential Nobel winners, but to the Nobel committee, she was invisible matter,” notes Shohini Ghose, in her book Her Space, Her Time: How Trailblazing women scientists decoded the hidden Universe .

Rubin received some compensation when she was eventually awarded the Gold Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society in 1996. However, the only other woman to receive the award before her was Caroline Herschel – in 1828. As Ghose puts it, the 168-year gap in recognising female astronomers was “a ridiculously long stretch”.

Since the turn of this century, more women have been following careers in astronomy, although the profession still remains predominantly male, says Sue Bowler, journals editor of the Royal Astronomical Society. “‘When you go to meetings about related subjects such as atmospheric physics you find the audience is 50-50 male-female. But at some astronomy meetings, it can be as low as 10% women. I don’t really know why that is.”

Other signs suggest some movement towards recognising female astronomers. In 2020, the American scientist Andrea Ghez became the first female astronomer to win a Nobel prize for physics for her work on the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. Given that only four other women have ever won the physics Nobel, this could scarcely be described as trend-setting.

By contrast, there is a lengthy list of female astronomers who campaigners feel should have won Nobels but were denied them. Examples include Vera Rubin as well as Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who played a key role in identifying the first pulsar stars but who was denied a Nobel, which went instead to her Cambridge colleagues Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle. The decision still causes controversy.

“That was the first Nobel prize ever to be awarded for astronomical observations and Bell Burnell should have got a share, I have no doubt about that,” says Feehily. “Having done my research on this, what surprises me is not that things have changed but how, in so many ways, they have not changed enough.

“In the end, Payne-Gaposchkin prevailed. We now know, thanks to her, that most of the matter in the universe is hydrogen and helium. She was the first person to prove that – though it took a long time before her work was recognised for its remarkable quality. She still had to fight to get her due recognition and it is important to remember the battle she had to endure.”

• The Lightest Element is at Hampstead Theatre from 5 September to 12 October.