The Scientist!
Who do you think was the first to be called a scientist? Albert Einstein? Issac Newton? Galileo Galilei or Nicolaus Copernicus? When we asked ChatGPT to generate an image of a scientist, it produced a depiction of a man wearing geeky glasses and a lab coat. The irony is, the term 'scientist' was first used to describe a woman, Mary Somerville in the year 1834.
William Whemwell introduced the term 'Scientist' as a joke while reviewing the book 'On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences' written by Mary Somerville. It was her fourth book and one of the first books to be popular in the science genre. The reviewer, William Whemwell was marveled by its writing and described it to be 'Masterly'. Not so surprisingly, he couldn't get over the fact that a woman could write so fabulously about science. He writes, some women had even advanced so far in philosophy as to ‘look with dry eyes upon oxygen and hydrogen, to hear with tranquil minds of perturbations and eccentricities, to think with toleration that the light of their eyes may be sometimes polarised'.
Mary Somerville, born in 1780 was a determined young kid. From a very young age she understood that she would have to fight to get educated. She understood the injustice that denied her gender the luxury of education. Nevertheless she excelled in multiple branches of science and mathematics. Owing to her diverse expertise the regular terms used then, like physicists, chemists, botanists etc. proved insufficient to describe her. The prevalent term for someone as interdisciplinary as her was 'Man of Science', which was a clear misfit. This forced William Whemwell to coin the term 'Scientist' to aptly describe her work and maintain gender neutrality.
The problem of gender perceived in language is far from over. Even the most recently developed artificial intelligence pictures a man to be a Scientist, a CEO, or a Farmer. AI mirrors the existing societal biases, and changing this demands deliberate action. It takes a conscious effort to maintain gender neutrality.
For example, some historians believe that women were the first farmers. Statistics show that women constitute almost 33% of cultivators and close to 47% of agricultural labourers in India and yet we mostly associate the pronoun 'he' with farmer. A shift in perspective is crucial because, despite women's significant participation in the agricultural sector, women own only 12% of farmland in India and have little role in decision making of cropping patterns, sales and purchases. Society will generally accept a woman wanting to be a nurse, because caregiving is broadly associated with femininity, but a woman aspiring to be a farmer will be questioned. We believe building the narrative of 'she' farmers is important to break this stereotype. It will push more and more women to be involved in decision making, to be land owners, to be more self-sufficient and independent.
![]() |
Google images |
Written by Parvathy Ramachandran and edited by Janaky S @ThinkHer
References
- https://paulcraddock.substack.com/p/the-word-scientist-was-coined-in
- https://allthatsinteresting.com/mary-somerville
- https://spark.iop.org/somerville-first-scientist
- https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt
Well written,it is evident that the words coined are insufficient in every field..Keep writing
ReplyDeleteThanks. Lets create some more together <3
DeleteKeep up the fantastic work—Looking forward to reading more of your uplifting content!"
DeleteThanks <3
Delete