Women Scientists Shaped Developmental Biology From Its Very First Pages | Scienmag

Editor’s note: This article mentions Florence Peebles, a zoology researcher at Bryn Mawr between 1897 and 1919, who did a great deal of her work on regeneration and embryology at the Marine Biological Laboratory.

When Wilhelm Roux founded the journal that is today known as Development, Genes and Evolution in 1894 under the name Archiv für Entwicklungsmechanik der Organismen, its pages belonged entirely to men. The founder’s long mission statement in the first issue thanked a list of supporters he addressed as ‘Herren’ — gentlemen — and the publication record of the journal’s first three years consists exclusively of male authors. A new review by Volker Hartenstein, Tamara Franz-Odendaal and Angelika Stollewerk, published in the journal’s volume 234, digs through those early decades and arrives at a strikingly different picture of who actually built the field: women scientists contributed to every research area of developmental mechanics and helped steer its future direction.

The study examined the first 50 years of the journal, from 1894 to 1944, identifying the female authors, their affiliations, mentors and careers, and the topics and organisms they investigated. In total, 203 papers published during that period were written by women. The numbers tell a story of steady growth. Before 1920, women published an average of 2.1 papers per year, and seven years passed with no women-authored papers at all.