American Scientist

Her Space, Her Time: How Trailblazing Women Scientists Decoded the Hidden Universe. Shohini Ghose. 272 pp. The MIT Press, 2023. $29.95.

Shohini Ghose’s book Her Space, Her Time: How Trailblazing Women Scientists Decoded the Hidden Universe certainly fulfills its subtitle. The seven chapters are highly informative, each one having dramatic moments and discoveries. Ghose skillfully weaves together accessible descriptions of astrophysical concepts with the personal lives of the women scientists. I recommend this book as required reading for anyone teaching astronomy and astrophysics, as well as those with an amateur interest. However, this recommendation comes with a warning: Do not read this all in one sitting! Repeated themes emerge that give rise to anger, disappointment, and indignation. Worryingly, these themes of bad behavior remain rooted in astrophysics culture today.

The book is seven chapters plus an epilogue. Each chapter focuses on what can be considered watershed moments in physics and astrophysics, such as the development of spectral analysis of stars and other celestial bodies, and developments within outer space exploration. Ghose also reveals the luminary women that made substantial and definitive contributions, placing each woman within their broader social and scientific context. This also serves to teach the reader about a variety of concepts within physics and astrophysics.

Getting paid and getting equal pay for equal work was a struggle for many of the women profiled. Some scientists did decades of unpaid labor, whereas others were underpaid, regardless of the prestige of their scientific work. On my own astrophysics journey, I protested when a male was hired at a higher wage then me, when I had more direct experience and had to teach him to do his job. I was given the raise. More recently, I completed an interview-based project where not getting equal pay for doing the same job was discussed by one of the postdocs—and this was from 2020 to 2022. Not surprisingly, the person that was paid more was male and the person paid less was female. But in the midst of all of the bad news, Ghose writes about instances like Margaret Burbidge pushing the American Astronomical Society to refuse to hold meetings in states that had not ratified the U.S. Equal Rights Amendment—a positive example of using one’s power to instigate change.

Doing Nobel Prize-worthy work, and even in some cases, being nominated for a Nobel Prize but not getting one, emerges too many times. The heartbreaking cases are when the woman scientist died beforehand, thus never receiving this highest honor—or worse, having the prize unjustly go to their surviving collaborators (who were usually men). I qualify that by using "unjustly" because although in some cases their collaborators were true and equal collaborators, making the man equally Nobel Prize-worthy, in many cases it was the repeated theme of a man getting the credit for the woman’s work.

There are various examples of women not getting credit for their work, including: the observatory or department director or advisor taking credit for the woman astrophysicists’ work; a man not in the same group claiming the status of first discoverer, when in fact, they are the second; and in the case of Nazi-occupied Europe, former equal collaborators strategically omitting a Jewish woman scientist from their publications. In a few cases, these injustices have been rectified through showing the dates and contents of publications, but in most cases, the true history is not recognized or remains hidden.

Related to both unpaid or underpaid work and the lack of credit for one’s scientific achievements, another theme of the book is women being hired at a much lower rank than their experience merits. Over time, some of these women were given a salaried position when they previously worked for free or were promoted to senior positions far later than their achievements merited, but many were not so fortunate. In my own research, I found that females have more job precarity than males in astrophysics and that they lost more jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic than the males.

These themes make it emotionally difficult to read this book in one sitting. One needs time to cool their anger and sense of injustice before moving on to the next chapter. From the first chapter, Ghose shows women making amazing scientific discoveries while working within a society set up to exclude them. The undervaluing of women’s work and the forced limitations placed on women’s roles are sometimes counterbalanced by having supportive families and supportive mentors. Thus, Ghose leaves beacons highlighting how things should be and could be, scattered throughout the book. By writing this book, Ghose is doing the work of rectifying some of these past wrongs.