Award-winning British physicist, Athene Donald, tells us how to fight preconceived ideas about gender and suggests reading that could inspire women to pursue careers in science.

However, due to her increase in responsibilities and public appearances on behalf of the university, Bassi was able to petition for regular pay increases, which in turn was used to pay for her advanced equipment. Marie Curie paved the way for scientists to study radioactive decay and discovered the elements radium and polonium. In sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, numbers of female graduates in agricultural science have been increasing steadily, with eight countries reporting a share of women graduates of 40% or more: Lesotho, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. Thus, Bassi became the second woman in the world to earn a philosophy doctorate after Elena Cornaro Piscopia in 1678, 54 years prior. In the US, women with science or engineering doctoral degrees were predominantly employed in the education sector in 2001, with substantially fewer employed in business or industry than men.

The first known woman to earn a university chair in a scientific field of studies was eighteenth-century Italian scientist Laura Bassi.

You could say men tend to be more self-confident, but that’s almost certainly nurture not nature – it’s not a characteristic difference in the way that strength is. Rachel Ignotofsky is a New York Times bestselling author and illustrator who is proud to share stories of amazing women with the world. And I suppose I have somewhat reluctantly been thrust into this position, and I feel I have to embrace it because people tell me it matters to them. It was actually Wu who confirmed Enrico Fermi's hypothesis through her earlier draft that Xe-135 impeded the B reactor from working. I know quite a few women whose husbands have either given up their career or who have the kind of career – landscape painter, freelance journalist – whereby the women can do the intense job that requires you to be on site, while the husband is at home with the kids and can juggle his own activities around it.Of the seven Arab countries reporting data, four observe a steady percentage or an increase in female engineers (Morocco, Oman, Palestine and Saudi Arabia). Women are also under-represented in the sciences as compared to their numbers in the overall working population. In 1732 the university granted Bassi's professorship in philosophy, making her a member of the Academy of the Sciences and the first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university in Europe [53] But the university held the value that women were to lead a private life and from 1746 to 1777 she gave only one formal dissertation per year ranging in topic from the problem of gravity to electricity. Women's contributions were limited by their exclusion from most formal scientific education, but began to be recognized through their occasional admittance into learned societies during this period. Because it seems to me that – whether it’s nature or nurture – women appear to be less self-confident.

So how does the stereotype of women not being good at physics and maths affect the choices they make?

In the US, Maria Mitchell made her name by discovering a comet in 1847, but also contributed calculations to the Nautical Almanac produced by the United States Naval Observatory. In her first publication, The New Book of Flowers, she used imagery to catalog the lives of plants and insects. Under a pseudonym, Wortley Montague published an article describing and advocating in favor of inoculation in September 1722. Two of the laureates have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, Ada Yonath (2008) and Elizabeth Blackburn (2009).

Now Rachel lives in beautiful Missouri, USA, where she spends all day drawing and learning as much as she can. Jane Goodall is a British primatologist considered to be the world's foremost expert on chimpanzees and is best known for her over 55-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees.Outside academia, botany was the science that benefitted most from contributions of women in early modern times. Here, women jumped from representing 39% to 70% of agricultural graduates between 2000 and 2012, continued to dominate health (80–78%) but ceded ground in science (43–39%) and engineering (33–27%). Recorded examples include Aglaonike, who predicted eclipses; and Theano, mathematician and physician, who was a pupil (possibly also wife) of Pythagoras, and one of a school in Crotone founded by Pythagoras, which included many other women. Ignofotsky is a graphic designer and she has produced here not just beautiful illustrations that draw the eye and persuade it to linger, but also a great density of information distilled into nuggets of wonderful clarity.