Authors: Serena Datta and Leanne Tanaka
On the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, youth from the community, along with scientists and researchers from Michael Garron Hospital and East Toronto Health Partners, gathered to celebrate at the Youth Wellness Hub. The evening brought together high school students, young women, and leading figures in science for networking, mentorship, and career guidance. Events like this play a crucial role in empowering women, especially women of color, to pursue leadership roles in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), a field where they remain significantly underrepresented.
The evening began with an engaging “Science Network” activity that recreated LinkedIn interactions in real life. Everyone designed cards with their name, favourite subject, and interesting facts about themselves. After pinning their cards to a wall, students and scientists “connected” with each other by linking their cards with strings. It was amazing to see how many connections were formed, reinforcing a strong sense of community engagement and inclusion.
Students were also given the opportunity to connect with the guest scientists at each table. Our table spoke with Dr. Carloyn Steele Gray, a leading social science researcher at the University of Toronto. She shared valuable insights about her career journey in public health research and answered all of our questions about the social sciences.
It was incredibly inspiring to hear from all the successful women in science, who serve as powerful examples of leadership and resilience.
Their stories provide invaluable guidance during a pivotal time in students’ lives, as they face the crucial decisions that will shape their futures.
One such story, long buried in the archives of scientific history, is that of a young woman who stood on the precipice of one of the 20th century’s most revolutionary discoveries. She was working in a lab, analyzing chart data from a radio telescope, when suddenly, she noticed something strange; a series of repeating signals. It’s almost as if a star is blinking, sending us a message from light-years away. This is the discovery of pulsars, and the woman who made it, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, was largely left out of the credit for decades.
The Spark That Ignited a Revolution
In the late 1960s, Bell Burnell, then a graduate student at the University of Cambridge, was tasked with building a radio telescope to study cosmic phenomena. She was a young woman in a male-dominated field, and her work was dismissed by some of her peers as little more than a technical assignment.
Then, in 1967, while poring over chart data, she noticed something extraordinary: a series of regular radio signals coming from deep in space. It was as if someone—or something—was sending a message.
Her supervisors initially dismissed the signals as “scruff” or interference, but after further analysis, she realized they were too precise and too consistent to be anything other than a new, unexplained cosmic phenomenon. What she had discovered was a pulsar—a rapidly rotating neutron star that emitted regular pulses of radio waves.
Pulsars were proof that massive stars, after collapsing under their own gravity in a supernova explosion, could leave behind ultra-dense remnants—so dense, in fact, that a single teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh billions of tons. Additionally, their precise and stable radio signals were used to confirm aspects of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, including the behavior of spacetime near massive objects. Pulsars also helped scientists study gravitational waves, map interstellar space, and explore the mysterious dark matter that makes up much of the universe.
The Credit That Wasn’t Given
But Bell Burnell, despite her key role in the discovery, was not immediately recognized. The 1974 Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to her supervisor, Antony Hewish, and another scientist, Martin Ryle. Bell Burnell’s exclusion from the Nobel recognition was met with widespread criticism, and it sparked an ongoing debate about gender bias in science. The Nobel committee, in their defense, argued that she was a graduate student and thus, by their standards, not deserving of the prize. Bell Burnell had done the bulk of the work in identifying and analyzing the pulsar signals, yet her achievement was overshadowed by the very system that was meant to reward discovery.
Resilience and Recognition Beyond the Nobel
Though Bell Burnell did not receive the Nobel Prize, she has been later honored with numerous awards and accolades, including the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018. Instead of keeping the $3 million prize, she donated it to fund scholarships for women and minority students pursuing physics. In addition, she has held prestigious academic positions, including being the first woman to serve as President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
On this International Day of Women and Girls in Science, let her legacy inspire us to create a future where every voice in science is valued, recognized, and celebrated—because the universe thrives on the light of all its stars.
References
Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (2024, November 26). Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Encyclopædia Britannica.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jocelyn-Bell-Burnell
Lea, R. (2016, April 22). What are pulsars?. Space.com.
https://www.space.com/32661-pulsars.html
