Dr Margaret Burbidge - Infinite Women

Born: 12 August 1919, United Kingdom
Died: 5 April 2020
Country most active: United Kingdom, United States
Also known as: Eleanor Margaret Peachey

The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.

Astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge was repeatedly a victim of this particular type of gender discrimination. In 1945, Burbidge was rejected for a postdoctoral fellowship with Carnegie Observatories because the job required working at Mount Wilson Observatory, which women were not allowed to do at the time. Ten years later, she re-applied and was again rejected, but her less-qualified husband was hired instead—he was a theorist, where she was an observer, and the role was for an observer. Anytime he was required to go observing, she would accompany him, supposedly as his assistant, but in reality she was the one operating the telescope while he worked in the photographic dark room. When observatory management found out, they reluctantly agreed that she could work there, but only if they stayed in a separate cottage, rather than the catered dormitory for the men. In 1972, when she became the first female director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, the role was reduced—for three centuries, the position had been combined with the Astronomer Royal, but as soon as a woman came along, the roles were split, with a man taking the Astronomer Royal title.
As Burbidge experienced at the Mount Wilson Observatory, even once a woman gets her foot in the door, she is often held to higher standards and faces greater restrictions than the men around her. After earning her master’s degree in 1932, biochemist Mildred Cohn worked for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Though she had a supportive supervisor, she was the only woman among the seventy men, was given a lower position than she was qualified for, was explicitly told that she would never be promoted and was even banned from the lab. Rather than put up with that, she returned to Columbia—which she had left after a year because she’d been denied an assistantship because of her gender—to finish her PhD in physical chemistry. She went on to publish 160 papers and win countless awards…
Astrophysicist Margaret Burbidge and her husband Geoffrey were invited to work with William Alfred Fowler and Fred Hoyle at the University of Cambridge in 1951. They combined the data the Burbidges had collected on the abundances of different chemical elements in stars with Hoyle’s hypothesis that nuclear reactions in stars might produce chemical elements, a topic that Fowler had been conducting experiments on. Margaret was the lead author on their culminating paper in 1957, and their work established the basis for what came to be known as stellar nucleosynthesis. Of the four scientists, Fowler alone was awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on the topic, and expressed surprise that his colleagues were excluded. All four had also been nominated almost 20 years earlier for the 1964 award.