A vigorous Mitu movement exposes gender injustice in the workplace to the fullest. Looking back at the life path of Madame Curie a hundred years ago, what inspiration can we get from it? What responsibilities do we shoulder now?
This article was written in November 2010. At that time, I was a doctoral student at , Oxford University, with a dream of science and was indignant about the inequality between men and women in the scientific research circle. 8 years have passed, and I graduated, started a business, got married, and had children. Many changes have taken place in my life. But a vigorous Mitu movement still exposes gender injustice in the workplace. May all women stand up, make their own voices, realize their dreams, and create a better future for our daughters (including Xiao Taozi).
Do you want to be Madame Curie?
I think I will always remember that day. At that time, I was young and innocent, with full expectations for the future and the faint pain of my first love, and I boarded the plane from Shanghai to London. During those eleven hours, I couldn't fall asleep. Looking at the sea of clouds outside the cabin window, I thought: In order to vaguely worship the abstract noun of "science", I left the place where I grew up and lived a life of cash shortage. Is this what I want?
The busy and fulfilling days in London, and occasionally I will take my heart and ask myself: What is science? Why do I need to study science? Do I really want to take science as a profession? In a career dominated by white men, can I, an Asian girl with non-expressive IQ and EQ, really go on this road? So many women can’t finish this path, can I do it?
I think I will remember that night, the night was as bright as water. My roommates opened a party in our dormitory, and the crowds were filled with alcohol. I hid in my room and called my home. When I told my mother that I wanted to go to another school and study for a doctorate in a basic subject, my mother's surprised voice crossed the ocean, and it seemed particularly abrupt in the background of various rompers and flirting voices: Do you want to be Madame Curie?
Leaving the motherland
In October 1891, the young and beautiful Madame Curie, who was still single, was Maria Skłodowska at that time, left the motherland Polish and came to study at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Before this, as his elders scattered all their wealth in the country's turmoil and his mother died of illness, Mary's family was already in poverty. She had to agree with her sister: first work for two years to study in Paris, and then provide her with study after she got her degree. So Mary lived under someone's roof and worked as a tutor for several years before she came to Paris to study physics.
At this time, Mary's sadness in her parting may also be filled with the hidden pain of her first love. She once fell in love with Kazimierz Żorawski, the young master she taught. This handsome and smart Xiao Kai, who later became a famous mathematician, was related to Mary's family. But Zolosky's family looked down on Mary, a poor relative, and strongly opposed this relationship. Mary lost a lot because of this.
left is Madame Curie when she was young, and Zorawski
right is Zorawski
until he finally received Zorazki's breakup letter that Mary left the motherland with her broken heart. "Those days were very difficult to bear, and it was the saddest moment of my life. The only thing that makes me feel comforted when I recall it was that I still raised my head and withdrew gloriously." Should we thank this unsuccessful relationship now? If Mary had not left Poland and had never seen her later soul mate, Pierre Curie, our understanding of science might not be what it is now.
Pierre and Mary have many common topics. They also love long-distance travel, bicycles, and their work - science. When Pierre entered Mary's life, she might have returned home with the shadow of her old love affair. But when she was frustrated in her job search in Poland, she also realized that she could no longer live without Pierre.
Pierre married Mary a year later, and his first daughter was born two years later.This intimate work and life partner can no longer be separated from each other.
won the Nobel Prize two times
In March 2010, Fang Xian, a classmate from Squirrel Club, took me to the Madame Curie Museum in the fifth arrondissement of Paris. Today, it still retains the appearance of the laboratory where Mary worked many years ago. Next to the chemical reagents in the bottles and jars, there is a dark blue long dress with white dots, which is pretty but solemn. This is what Mary looks like in the experimental clothing back then.
In the age of Mary's work, one of the most important discoveries in the scientific community was uranium rays. Mary was determined to use this as a topic for her doctoral work. Using an electrostatic measuring instrument invented by her husband Pierre, she found that uranium can charge the surrounding air, and thus concluded that the radioactivity of the uranium compound depends only on the content of uranium in it. This discovery is one of Mary's important scientific achievements, which shows that radioactivity does not come from the reaction between molecules, but from the atoms themselves.
However, Mary's electrostatic meter again measured that the radioactivity of the mixture of bituminous uranium ore was four times that of pure uranium. Because Mary firmly believes in her previous inferences, she believes that there must be other more reflective substances in the asphalt uranium mine. Mary followed her own ideas and found Thorium.
Pierre is quite supportive of Mary's idea, and he even paused his own crystal work to help Mary separate the uranium mine together. Together they found Pole, Mary named this element after her native Poland.
In science, the exploration of the unknown world is quite exciting, but it is accompanied by many failures. In 1898, due to insufficient estimates, although Mary and Pierre found radium, the number was pitifully small. In the following years, they carried out a lot of boring and hard work, and finally, in 1902, 0.1 grams of radium chloride was isolated from a ton of asphalt uranium ore.
In 1903, Mary received her Ph.D. from the University of Paris. In the same year, she shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband (also a tutor), and Mary became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in and .
In 1904, Mary gave birth to her second daughter.
The Curie couple riding a bicycle (Photo source: newindianexpress.com)
Two years later, Pierre died in a car accident. Mary was in so much pain that she might even suffer from depression. "I will be hopeless from now on, and I will be lonely forever." The Department of Physics at Sorbonne University decided to pass on Pierre's position as president, along with the position of director of the laboratory, to Mary. Mary found comfort from her work and gradually walked out of the huge shadow of life.
1910, Mary independently isolated pure radium metal and won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, becoming the only scientist to win the Nobel Prize in two fields except Pauling . What's even more rare is that she gave up the patent for radium separation technology and contributed this hard-earned result to the whole world.
female doctor
Mari may not have thought that a hundred years later she has become synonymous with "female scientist". She would not have thought that in the distant China, "female scientist" and "female doctor" have become derogatory terms.
"There are three types of people in the world, one is a man, two is a woman, and three is a female doctor."
"The college student is Zhao Min, the undergraduate student is Huang Rong, the master student is Li Mochou, the doctoral student is Master Mie Jue, and the postdoctoral student is Dongfang Bubai."
"Men are worried about papers during the day, and worry about getting married at night."
"Men don't want female doctors, the supervisor is harsh female doctors, and the employer refuses to sign female doctors."
...
and other remarks are endless, and the female doctors are thrown into the cold palace, which the public avoids.
investigates the roots of society, and various opinions are endless: the traditional view of "high men and low women", age and face are more attractive to men, and are prone to being unspoken by mentors, reading will miss the age of childbirth, gender discrimination in the employment market, anti-intellectual ideas in society... But this phenomenon seems to have no possibility of change in the short term.
In the Western world where the scientific profession is relatively mature, the term "sexual discrimination" is a taboo. Many organizations and institutions have provided a lot of policy and economic help to encourage women to engage in scientific research. Compared with Madame Curie's era, public explicit discrimination is quite rare.But even so, compared with male work partners, women's scientific journey is still relatively difficult.
There is a leaky pipeline in some "hard science" fields in the United States (physics, computer science, etc.): From undergraduate, doctoral, postdoctoral, lecturer to professor, and even top scientists, more and more women have leaked out and left the field of science in this "pipeline" of science career. University of Pennsylvania Professor of Biochemistry and Chairman of the American Society of Women Scientists (WISE), Phoeby Leboy, said in an article published in 2009 that in most fields, the number of women studying science is no less than that of men, but in senior positions in the academic circle, women account for only 30%.
In the Western world, marriage may not be a major bond that hinders women's pursuit of science, but fertility is indeed a major barrier. Since the completion time of most important tasks by scientists and the rising period of careers are between 25 and 35 years old, this is exactly the ideal childbearing age for women.
Statistics from the UC Berkeley Center for American progress in 2009 show that married women with children have a chance of tenure-time teaching positions 35% lower than married men with children and 33% lower than single women without children. Women who have children during their postdoctoral period have twice as likely to rethink their career goals than men or women without children. Only 13% of graduate students and 23% of postdoctoral fellows said they were given 6 weeks of paid maternity leave.
even has a few obvious gender discrimination. In my university, a biology professor once commented privately: Because most female doctoral students will leave science and marry and have children after their days, cultivating them is a waste of resources. It is better to train more male doctoral students to reserve talents for the future scientific community. In 2005, Harvard President Lawrence Summers said in a public speech that the disadvantage of women's numbers in the field of science comes from innate lack of ability. This sentence suddenly caused an uproar. Sanmers' future resignation is not unrelated to this.
not destroyed by reputation
If you are scared by the actual data, then in Madame Curie's life, how can she face the severely serious naked gender discrimination nowadays?
When young Mary just obtained her degree from Sorbonne University, she applied to return to Kraków University in Poland to engage in scientific research, but was quickly rejected. Biography says this is because Polish universities at that time discriminated against female scientists. Even in 1911, after she had won two Nobel Prizes, the French Academy of Sciences still did not select Madame Curie as an academician of the Academy of Sciences due to her prejudice against women. It was not until half a century later that Madame Curie's student Marguerite Perey became the first female academician of the French Academy of Sciences.
Madame Curie in the laboratory (Photo source: znamus.ru)
Madame Curie's biggest controversy in her life may come from her love affair with Paul Langevin. Lang Zhiwan was a student of Pierre during his lifetime and an outstanding physicist. It is said that he has a cold relationship with his wife, but he is deeply fascinated by the still beautiful and charming Mary. Major newspapers hyped up the scandal. Out of xenophobia and because of the controversial gimmick of "female scientist mistress", the originally romantic and passionate French people could not tolerate Mary and described her as a "Polish slut." The relationship was later left unresolved. However, coincidentally, Madame Curie's granddaughter married Lang Zhiwan's grandson many years later.
When the scandal is gradually forgotten in the corner of history, what people can see now is Madame Curie continues to work fearlessly with her independent and strong personality. Her outstanding scientific achievements have finally attracted worldwide attention, and her selfless work results have benefited many people. Her technique is used to treat soldiers injured during World War I. Even all kinds of super-energy "radium" products that claimed to be eternal youth and prolong their lives at that time were filled with the streets and alleys, just like today's "nano products".
In Madame Curie's laboratory, her daughter and son-in-law won the Nobel Prize in 1935 for discovering artificial radiation.Afterwards, many scientists came here to work and tried to use Madame Curie's isolated radium to treat skin cancer and other diseases, and achieved many results. Until today, the Institute Curie is still an important cancer research institution.
Warsaw Polytechnic University studded with a sculpture of Mary. Zolosky, the first lover of the famous mathematics professor, has sat silently in front of this sculpture countless times. Many years later, Warsaw built another institute and museum to commemorate Mary to commemorate the country's outstanding daughter.
In 1995, the bodies of Mary and Pierre were sent to the Pantheon of Paris, which symbolizes the highest honor of France. The poor girl from overseas became the only woman in the National Pantheon. Her character is widely praised. Einstein once said: Madame Curie may be the only person who has not been destroyed by reputation.
Our Responsibility
In the Madame Curie Museum, I flipped through various photos and watched as the young Mary grew into the gray-haired Madame Curie. What remains unchanged is her ever-resolute and resolute eyes. Whenever I look at her, I feel a kind of power rising in my heart.
I think of the American female physicist Rosalyn (Rosalyn) Yalow's speech after winning the Nobel Prize in Physiology in 1977: "We cannot expect that in the short term, women who pursue it will have equal opportunities. But if women have begun to work towards this goal, we must believe in ourselves, otherwise others will not believe in us. We must combine our desires with the ability, courage and determination to succeed. We must shoulder responsibility and strive to make the path of later women easier. If we start to solve many problems that have troubled us, the world will We will not bear half of the human intelligence loss. "
" If we believe that human beings will continue to survive and reproduce on the earth, we must believe that the next generation will eventually be wiser than the previous generation. Next generation, we will pass on all our knowledge and insights to you. Your responsibility is to use this knowledge to add more achievements and pass them on to your children."
I would like to encourage you with all female doctoral students, female scientific workers, and millions of women who are bravely moving on their own path.
Related reading
[1] Does Madame Curie only focus on career but not family? http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-2237-5183.html
[2] Curie and the French Academy of Sciences http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-2237-4638.html
[3] Rare variety: Outstanding female scientist http://blog.sciencenet.cn/blog-2237-218865.html
