Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell was born in Belfast in 1943 which makes her a contemporary of mine and a much admired one. She was a living role model to use in the promotion of equal opportunities in the study of science in schools.
After her marriage she became known as Jocelyn Bell Burnell and now she is known around the world as Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
She grew up in Northern Ireland during the nineteen fifties and faced a number of challenges while accessing and pursuing her chosen career in astrophysics.
At school she had to face a ban on girls taking science and she was sent to cookery classes instead.
As an undergraduate at Glasgow University she was the only woman in a class of 50 which was common in physics in those days and it was also common for men to shout, jeer and bang on their desks whenever a woman entered the room. Jocelyn put up with that for two years coming as it did from up to 49 male students.
As a postgraduate at Cambridge University she claims to have suffered from “imposter syndrome” feeling that she didn’t deserve to be there although she clearly did.
Her answer to all this was not to give up but to work even harder and prove herself. While working on her PhD thesis at the Cavendish laboratories in Cambridge she stayed up for long hours analysing the information coming in through a radio telescope that she helped to build.
She identified unexplained blips in the signals that other researchers ignored or didn’t notice. “Bits of scruff” as she called them. She began to label them LGM on her charts which stood for “Little Green Men”, not that she believed in aliens from outer space, it was just her humorous way of labelling unexplained data.
Due to her painstaking analysis of the data these blips were eventually recognised as pulsating signals from rapidly rotating neutron stars. These are stars that have exploded but are not heavy enough to shrink down to black holes. The Daily Telegraph called them pulsars and it stuck.
Jocelyn was now famous around the world but when it came to handing out awards the Nobel Prize went to her supervisor, Professor Antony Hewish.
She was marvelled at for being a woman in what was regarded in those days as a 100% male domain. She took part in a number of interviews during which Hewish would be asked about the astrophysics and Jocelyn would be asked for her vital statistics or the colour of her hair or how many boyfriends she had. She was even asked to undo some buttons for one photograph.
Over the years I have read about the lives of many remarkable women and their stories now have the ability to shock young people, helping them to realise that the struggle for equality has never been easy.
In science we have come a long way in the last 70 years to establish gender equality and it is down to the perseverance of women like Jocelyn Bell Burnell. I am especially admiring of her because she seemed always to display humility and good humour while persistently refusing to be ground down by the prejudice that she, and many other women, experienced. She provided me with one of the best examples that I could find to inspire young women with confidence, inspiration and the realisation that science can be for them.
Written on International Women’s Day March 2003
