Born: 1904 (circa), United States
Died: 1999
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
During World War II, the U.S. Navy was trying to find a solution for “fouling”—when barnacles attach to ship hulls en masse, which slows the ship and increases fuel consumption. Yet when Dr. Dora Henry, the leading expert in the country, if not the world, on barnacles offered her services to help with the research, the men in charge declined. She later heard that the researchers could not even get a barnacle to grow in the lab for them to study. Dr. Henry went back to the site and diagnosed the problem within minutes—the ocean water they had collected had been extensively filtered, and the barnacle larvae had been filtered right out. Months of work had been completely wasted, and progress delayed.
Despite having a PhD in zoology in 1931, it was more than a year before carcinologist (someone who studies crustaceans) Dora Henry was offered a job at the University of Washington, where she had followed her husband for his career. When she was finally offered a position, it was only at the level of research associate, even though she was already well-published in her field, thanks at least in part to anti-nepotism rules—at the University of Washington, wives of staff members were prohibited from paid work anywhere other than as clerks, secretaries, or laboratory assistants. For years, she was paid at a part-time salary, despite putting in the same full-time hours as her male colleagues and winning National Science Foundation grants annually for decades for her work. It was in 1960 that she was finally promoted to associate research professor. As Catherine Musemeche writes in her book Lethal Tides,
The predictable consequences of such sweeping rules were that wives who happened to be scientists were penalised even if equally qualified. Women carcinologists often worked with little or no financial compensation. It was not unusual for women to be offered lower salaries or for them to take decreases in salaries to allow their male colleagues access to more funds… Even though many of these women made discoveries that exceeded the accomplishments of the men with whom they worked, they were treated like the farm league of researchers.