It all started with the 19th Amendment . . .

I was looking for information about the 1955 B-Movie Tarantula, and came across this review. It turns out the "line to listen for" is

“I knew it would happen. Give women the vote and what do you get? Lady scientists.”

Of course, why didn't I think of that! Maybe the election year voter drives will increase the number of women physics professors . . . Actually I think it would be pretty funny in a "look how stupidly sexist it used to be the 1950s" way if there weren't individuals currently bemoaning both the terrible effects of women voting and working as scientists.

Anyway, if you are interested in seeing Tarantula in a science-friendly environment - and you live in Southern California - you might want to check out tomorrow's showing as part of the B Movies and Bad Science series at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

And here are some links I've been collecting about the way women scientists are portrayed in film and television that I hadn't gotten around to blogging about:

• Inkling Magazine: Babe Scientists on Film
  "For best results in science, wear short shorts. And be sure your deep intellect is matched by deep cleavage."
• Science and Supermodels: Female Scientists in Movies: The Top 10
  "We have to make a choice in a lot of cases; great women or great science. Sometimes we get both but that’s rare."
• io9: Television: Meet the New Science Heroes
  This is about the portrayal of scientists on TV in general, but there is at least one woman scientist who will be on-screen in the fall lineup: Deanna Russo as super-scientist Sarah Graiman on the new version of Knight Rider.
  

Image: John Agar as small town physician Matt Hastings and Mara Corday as scientist Stephanie "Steve" Clayton in Tarantula.

Tags: Tarantula, women in science, movies

Invisible Computers

I'm a computer user, not a programmer, and I'm rather fuzzy on the history of computers. However, I have heard of ENIAC, which, as Wikipedia puts it, was "the first purely electronic, Turing-complete, digital computer capable of being reprogrammed to solve a full range of computing problems". It was constructed during World War II at the University of Pennsylvania. It was a behemoth compared to the laptop I'm using at the moment.

It contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 8.5 feet by 3 feet by 80 feet (2.6 m by 0.9 m by 26 m), took up 680 square feet (63 m²), and consumed 150 kW of power. Input was possible from an IBM card reader, while an IBM card punch was used for output.

It's hard to imagine operating such a machine, let alone programing it. The trouble back then was that male mathematicians were scarce due the war, so they had to turn to women to get the job done. A team of six young women were the first ENIAC programmers, but their contribution has been largely forgotten. From a recent ABC News report:

At 83, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik -- a devoted bridge player and grandmother of five -- had a secret past that was invisible to many who knew her.

Her grandson Alex knew her story. He stormed out of school one day when his teacher refused to believe his gray-haired granny was a computer pioneer who had calculated firing tables and ballistic trajectories during World War II.

The boy's parents had to explain to the teacher that Bartik and five other women had, indeed, legally hacked the world's first programmable computer, converting it into a stored machine and eventually helping to usher in the digital age.

"She was dumbfounded," said Bartik.

So, too, were the historians, who for a half century never acknowledged the wartime contributions of the six women who programmed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) and made programming easier and more accessible to those who followed.

The team included:

• Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli had a degree in math from Chestnut Hill College for Women in Philadelphia. Antonelli married ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly, resigning her post at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds Ballistics Research Laboratory. In the 1980s she wrote articles and gave talks about her experience. In 2005 Antonelli and good friend and co-programmer Bartik talked about their experiences at WITI New York, which you can watch online. She died in 2006.
• Jean Jennings Bartik had a degree in math from Northwest Missouri State Teachers College. After working on ENIAC, she went on to work on the BINAC and UNIVAC I computers. Northwest Missouri State University honored her achievements by naming their computing museum after her. In 2005 Bartik and Antonelli talked about their experiences at WITI New York, which you can watch online.
  
• Betty Snyder Holberton studied English and journalism at the University of Pennsylvania, but was apparently a natural at programming. From Wikipedia:
  

  She was the inventor of the mnemonic instruction set (called C-10) for the BINAC, which Grace Hopper described as "the basis for all subsequent programming languages." It has been said that in creating this, she started the movement away from switch assemblies and towards keyboards as the primary input device for computers. She also wrote the first generative programming system (SORT/MERGE), and the first statistical analysis package (for the 1950 US Census). She participated in the early standards development for the COBOL and Fortran programming languages.

  In 1997 she received the Ada Lovelace award for her achievements in programming. She died in 2001.
  
• Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer studied something(?) at Temple University. She left the ENIAC project in 1947 to get married.
• Frances Bilas Spence majored in math and minored in physics at Chestnut Hill College. In 1947 she married Homer Spence, an electrical engineer assigned to the project, and she resigned to raise a family.
• Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum had a bachelor's degree in math from Hunter College. She traveled with the ENIAC project when it moved to the Ballistic Research Laboratory at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds and helped train the next group of ENIAC programmers. She died in 1986.
  

Shockingly, the only one of the six initially invited to the ENIAC 40th anniversary celebration at the University of Pennsylvania was Kathleen McNulty Mauchly, and then only as the wife of inventor John Mauchly. How could this group of women have been forgotten for so long? As Wired noted in 1997, when they were inducted into the Women in Techonology International Hall of Fame:

But although they were skilled mathematicians and logicians, the women were classified as "sub-professionals" presumably due to their gender and as a cost-saving device, and never got the credit due to them for their groundbreaking work.

"Somebody else stood up and took credit at the time, and no one looked back," explains Anna van Raaphorst-Johnson, a director of WITI. "It's a typical problem in a male-dominated industry. And there's still a lot of frustration with men taking credit for women's ideas - it doesn't seem to have changed much over the last 50 years."

Kathy Kleiman, a former programmer herself, is trying to rectify that. Kleiman, along with Academy Award-winning documentary maker Susan Hadary and head of the University of Maryland's Center for Women in Information Technology Claudia Morrell, is producing a documentary on these six women titled "Invisible Computers: The Story of the ENIAC Programmers".

As ABC News reported, Kleiman began her interest in the ENIAC programmers when she was a Harvard undergraduate.

While reading a biography of an Army captain who found funding for ENIAC, Kleiman discovered a 1940s photo of women at a 9-foot tall computer. A computer historian told her those were "just refrigerator ladies" who had been posed in front of the machine "to make it look good."

"They looked knowledgeable to me, and I made it my job to track them down," said Kleiman.

She has since spent years collecting oral histories and hopes that the documentary will help keep their story from being forgotten. Stories like this are important, not only so an important part of our technological history is not forgotten, but as a rebuttal to those who claim that women don't go into computer science or mathematics simply because they aren't interested. If you'd like to help, you can make a donation to help support the production ENIAC programmers documentary.

On that note, Aunt B. at Tiny Cat Pants is asking for stories about womens' experiences in mathematics and computer science. It's in response to a commenter who claims that the reason for the gender gap in computer science is simply that "not as many women wanted to be computer scientists as men". Her commenters have already responded with a number of interesting (and maddening) personal stories.

ETA: Did you comment at Tiny Cat Pants? Science writer Jennifer Ouellette is wondering if she can include your story in a book she's writing about women and math.

Image: "Two women operating the ENIAC's main control panel while the machine was still located at the Moore School. "U.S. Army Photo" from the archives of the ARL Technical Library. Left: Betty Jennings (Mrs. Bryant) Right: Frances Bilas (Mrs. Spence)"

Tags: ENIAC, Invisible Computers, WWII, women in science, Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, Jean Jennings Bartik, Betty Snyder Holberton, Frances Bilas Spence , Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, Ruth Lichterman Teitelbaum<

Discover on Movie Scientists

In February (yes, I'm behind in my reading, why do you ask?) Discover Magazine listed "20 Things You Didn't Know about Movie Scientists". Not surprisingly, the few female movie scientists are often as much for eye candy as to drive the plot, the notable exception being Dr. Zira.

• 11. According to a 2005 study, less than 20 percent of scientists portrayed on screen from 1929 to 2003 were women. The research also revealed that almost all of the women were young, thin, and beautiful, although some did wear glasses.
• 12. In 1944 Greer Garson became the first and last woman to be nominated for an Oscar for a portrayal of a scientist. Her Madame Curie was young, thin, and beautiful, but did not wear glasses. The real Marie Curie did.
• 13. You've come a long way, monkey? One notable female movie scientist does not fit the stereotype: Zira, the simian psychiatrist from Planet of the Apes, was muscular and hairy. As we learn in Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), the third installment of the series, Dr. Zira vivisected and experimented on human captives, who in the movie year of 3955 are considered animals and thus expendable in the pursuit of scientific knowledge.

Tags: women scientists, movies

Rosalind Franklin and Hedy Lamarr movies in the works

In a report filed with Nature News on the Science and Technology Series at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival, Emma Marris notes that there are two movies about women in technology and science may be in the works:

The rumour mill has it that the life of Heddy Lamar [sic] — the glamorous actress and inventor of the cryptographic strategy of hopping between radio frequencies to keep a message secret — is slated to be turned into a film called Face Value. I heard the name Anna Paquin (Oscar-winning child star of The Piano, now grown up) floating around for the lead role. Broken Code will take as its subject Rosalind Franklin, the molecular biologist involved with the discovery of DNA, and may be directed by Peter Bogdanovich (acclaimed director of The Last Picture Show amongst others).

The Franklin movie isn't much of a secret; the Time Out Movie Blog reported on Bogdanovich's "Broken Code" a year ago. According to its IMDB entry, it's based on Anne Sayre's biography, Rosalind Franklin and DNA, which was written in response to Watson's The Double Helix.

After reading James Watson's The Double Helix (1968), Anne Sayre began working on an account of the role of Rosalind Franklin in the discovery of the structure of DNA. Sayre felt that the portrait of her friend Franklin (who had died in 1958) that emerged from Watson's book was not only unflattering, but wrong.

Sayre herself was an interesting woman. After her death in 1998, her husband wrote an appreciation of her life for the International Union of Crystallography which explains her special relationship with Franklin:

Anne was not a scientist. In 1943, having gone to Radcliffe College and gotten a degree in government, she joined the Radiation Laboratory at M.I.T. to do her bit for the war effort; her job had to do with ordering special-design transformers for the lab. She never really came to know what a transformer was, and within a few months, feeling that her efforts were really helping our opponents more than ourselves, she left the lab for a job she could handle. She was there long enough, however, for us to meet, and shortly after the war we married.

But if not a scientist herself, she cared for scientists and in an important sense, understood their work; married to a scientist, she often said that she was a camp-follower to the scientists. And she was articulate. From about the mid-40s to the mid-70s, she was a successful writer, mainly of short stories, of which several found their way into the Foley's and the Best American Short Stories collections. When in 1949 we went to England so that I could study crystallography under Dorothy Hodgkin, she helped keep us financially afloat with her sales of stories, and with her job as an editor at the Oxford University Press. It happened too, in 1949, that she met Rosalind Franklin, and they became fast friends. We saw Rosalind fairly frequently through the next two years, while we were in Oxford and she in London, this period covering most of the period of Rosalind's work on DNA, though not the final months, as we came home to the U.S. in Sept 1951, a few months prior to the solving of the DNA structure. In the next few years she visited us several times in the U.S., and I think it was in 1957 that Anne helped nurse her in England following her unsuccessful operation for cancer. Rosalind died in 1958.

After completing the Franklin biography, at the age of 52, Sayre went back to school, getting her law degree from NYU. She did pro bono work in environmental law and served as a court justice up until a year before her death. It's a shame she won't see the movie made from her book.

As for the the Lamarr biopic, that does sound like a bit of a scoop. I couldn't find any additional information online. I've always been fascinated with Lamarr as a brilliant and beautiful woman that embodies the contradictions between stereotypical femininity and the stereotype of the male technical mind. Her invention supposedly came out of a conversation with co-inventor George Antheil that started with boob jobs and shifted to military communications (not that surprising, perhaps, since Lamarr had attended business meetings with her first husband Fritz Mandl, one of the largest armaments manufacturers in Europe).

He met Hedy Lamarr in the summer of 1940, when they were neighbors in Hollywood and she approached him with a question about glands: She wanted to know how she could enlarge her breasts. In time the conversation came around to weapons, and Lamarr told Antheil that she was contemplating quitting MGM and moving to Washington, D.C., to offer her services to the newly established National Inventors Council.

They began talking about radio control for torpedoes. The idea itself was not new, but her concept of "frequency hopping" was. Lamarr brought up the idea of radio control. Antheil's contribution was to suggest the device by which synchronization could be achieved.

You can read the whole story at invention.com. There is definitely the potential for an interesting movie in her story.

Tags: movies, Rosalind Franklin, Broken Code, Hedy Lamarr, Face Value

Women Scientists in the Movies

Sidney Perkowitz is a physicist at Emory University who writes about science and scientists in the movies. Last July he had and interesting article in The Scientist: "Female scientists on the big screen". His search through the IMdB "identified 84 women scientists out of 382 films containing scientists" or 22% of films*. He notes that the stereotypical female scientist is portrayed differently than the stereotypical male scientist:

Surprisingly, women scientists are not particularly mad, evil, or nerdy. Indeed, Steinke notes in her survey that in 23 films, only two were mad and only three were absent-minded or antisocial. Moreover, in contrast to male scientists, women scientists do not work on "dubious" projects in secret laboratories, but remain solid "with their feet on the ground," Flicker reports. Female scientists also didn't contribute to "negative myths surrounding the image of science," she notes.

But it's with looks that the discrepancy becomes really obvious. The female film scientist tends to be gorgeous. In Flicker's words, she is "remarkably beautiful and, compared with her qualifications, unbelievably young. She has a model's body -- thin, athletic, perfect -- is dressed provocatively and is sometimes 'distorted' by wearing glasses."

He points to his favorite fictional female scientist: Elisabeth Shue's cold fusion-inventor Emma Russell in The Saint:

... Emma is the scientific center, and shows grit and moral courage. When she finds that Simon Templar (Val Kilmer) has romanced her only to steal her cold fusion secrets, she persuades him that the ethical thing is to give the secrets to the world. Emma emerges as having it all: her work, idealism, intelligence, femininity, sexuality, good looks -- and Kilmer.

Other female scientist characters who escape being mere sex objects in lab coat are Jodie Foster's Ellie Arroway in Contact, and Laura Dern's paleobotanist Ellie Sattler in Jurassic Park. Hopefully, we'll see more scientists - both female and male - positively portrayed on the big screen in the future.

More reading (scholarly articles that require subscription or purchase):

• Flicker E. "Between Brains and Breasts --- Women Scientists in Film: On the Marginalization and Sexualization of Scientific Competence" Public Understanding of Science, Vol. 12, No. 3, 307-318 (2003)
• Flicker E. "Representation of Women Scientists in Feature Films: 1929-2003"
• Steinke J. "Cultural Representations of Gender and Science" Science Communication, Vol. 27, No. 1, 27-63 (2005)

*Confusingly Perkowitz goes on to discuss the numbers as if 22% of scientists in those movies were women. I suspect the number is lower in that, because movies with female scientists usually also have male scientists, while there are many movies with only male scientists. For example, in Contact, a good example of a female scientist in film, all of Jodie Foster's colleagues are male.

Tags: women, scientists, movies