Over the past few years, a team of students led by Emilia Huerta-Sánchez from Brown University and Rori Rohlfs from San Francisco State University has been searching through two decades’ worth of acknowledgments in genetics papers and discovering women who were never given the credit that would be expected for today’s researchers. They identified dozens of female programmers who made important but unrecognized contributions. Some were repeatedly thanked in the acknowledgments of several papers, but were never recognized as authors. They became literal footnotes in scientific history, despite helping make that history.
“When Emilia and I look at our elders in population genetics, there are very, very few women,” says Rohlfs. “But there were women and they were doing this work. To even know that they existed is a big deal to me.”
The project started with Hidden Figures, the 2016 movie about three black female mathematicians who helped NASA win the space race in the 1960s. After seeing the film, Huerta-Sánchez and Rohlfs felt surprised that they had never heard of its three protagonists. How many other historical female scientists were they similarly unaware of, they wondered?
One name sprang readily to mind: Jennifer Smith. Huerta-Sánchez remembered reading a classic, decades-old paper in which Smith was thanked in the acknowledgments “for ably programming and executing all the computations.” That seemed odd. Today, programming is recognized as crucial work, and if a scientist did all the programming for a study, she would expect to be listed as an author. “It was weird to me that Smith was not an author on that paper,” Huerta-Sánchez says. “[Rori and I] wanted to see if there were more women like her.”
The duo recruited five undergraduate students, who looked at every issue of a single journal—Theoretical Population Biology—published between 1970 and 1990. They pored through hard copies of almost 900 papers, pulled out every name in the acknowledgments, worked out whether they did any programming, and deduced their genders where possible. Rochelle Reyes, one of the students, says that she was “extremely motivated” to do this work, having grown up on stories of under-recognized pioneers like Rosalind Franklin, who was pivotal in deciphering the structure of DNA, and Henrietta Lacks, whose cells revolutionized medical research. “I was fortunate to grow up in a diverse environment with a passion for science as well as social justice,” Reyes says.
She and her colleagues found that in the 1970s, women accounted for 59 percent of acknowledged programmers, but just 7 percent of actual authors. That decade was a pivotal time for the field of population genetics, when the foundations of much modern research were laid. “Based on authorship at the time, it seems that this research was conducted by a relatively small number of independent individual scientists, nearly all of whom were men,” the team writes. But that wasn’t the case.