The first woman in Bright Sparcs, in chronological terms, is notable for the fact that she never visited Australia and was not English. Pauline de Courcelles Knip (1781-1851) was a French natural history artist who was born and died in Paris but had the fortune to paint bird specimens brought back by French scientific expeditions including Baudin's expedition of 1800-1804. However, she does set the trend for many decades to come, as most women involved in the sciences of the nineteenth century were engaged in the biological and human sciences.
On the day of the launch of the Where are the Women in Australian Science project (22 August 2003) this search listed 620 women out of a total of 4488 people registered. As new data is continually added these figures will grow and we hope the proportion of women will increase.
The participation of women in Australian science, technology and medicine varied significantly from period to period. The periods we have selected reflect times of change, and it is interesting to compare the lives of the women from these different periods.
The following browse pages include subsets of women in the Bright Sparcs database who were alive:
We can also select women who were born between the end of World War I and the outbreak of World War II, whose scientific careers flourished or otherwise in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Create your own searches of Bright Sparcs on the full data set (including men) by going to Bright Sparcs Search.