Books like Women in science by Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her consent and later became the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, driving major scientific breakthroughs while raising questions of ethics, race, and medical exploitation.

Hidden Figures tells the true story of four African‑American mathematicians—Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Christine Darden—who broke barriers at NASA’s Langley Research Center, proving that talent, not race or gender, powers scientific progress.

Explore the quirky and dramatic stories behind every element on the periodic table, from Gandhi’s iodine debate to Marie Curie’s radium woes and laboratory pranks with gallium.

James Watson recounts the race to determine DNA’s double‑helix structure, detailing his collaboration with Francis Crick, the scientific rivalry with Linus Pauling, and the insights that reshaped biochemistry and genetics.

International Women in Science: A Bibliographical Dictionary to 1950 presents the enormous contributions of women outside North America in fields ranging from aviation to computer science to zoology. It provides fascinating profiles of nearly 400 women scientists, both renowned figures like Florence Nightingale and Marie Curie and women we should know better, like Rosalind Franklin, who, along with James Watson and Francis Crick, uncovered the structure of DNA.Students and researchers will see how the lives of these remarkable women unfolded, and how they made their place in fields often stubbornly guarded by men, overcoming everything from limited education and professional opportunities, to indifference, ridicule, and cultural prejudice, to outright hostility and discrimination. Included are a number of living scientists, many of whom provide insights into their lives and scientific times. Those contributions, plus additional previously unavailable material, make this a volume of unprecedented scope and richness.

Since 1901 these have been over three hundred recipients of the Nobel Prize in the sciences. Only ten of them - about 3 percent - have been women. Why? In this updated version of Nobel Prize Women in Science, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores the reasons for this astonishing disparity by examining the lives and achievements of fifteen women scientists who either won a Nobel Prize or played a crucial role in a Nobel Prize-winning project. The book reveals the relentless discrimination these women faced both as students and as researchers. Their success was due to the fact that they were passionately in love with science.

Publisher's description: Why do so few women choose a career in science--even as they move into medicine and law in ever-greater numbers? In one of the most comprehensive studies of gender differences in science careers ever conducted, Women in Science provides a systematic account of how U.S. youth are selected into and out of science education in early life, and how social forces affect career outcomes later in the science labor market. Studying the science career trajectory in its entirety, the authors attend to the causal influences of prior experiences on career outcomes as well as the interactions of multiple life domains such as career and family. While attesting to the progress of women in science, the book also reveals continuing gender differences in mathematics and science education and in the progress and outcomes of scientists' careers. The authors explore the extent and causes of gender differences in undergraduate and graduate science education, in scientists' geographic mobility, in research productivity, in promotion rates and earnings, and in the experience of immigrant scientists. They conclude that the gender gap in parenting responsibilities is a critical barrier to the further advancement of women in science.