Women’s contribution to the periodic table. A proposal of learning activities in the Bachelor of Chemistry Degree

Abstract

In a society where gender inequality is still present, it is crucial to fight for a change in the field of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The first step is to give visibility to women who have made exemplary contributions to science. In particular, this project focuses on gender bias in the creation of the periodic table during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where women chemists and physicists played a very significant role. In 1869, Dmitri Ivánovich Mendeleev published his version of the periodic table, which remains one of the most prominent representations in the world of chemistry. However, the periodic system was also the result of the collaborative work of many scientists who predicted and classified chemical elements before and after Mendeleev. Others discovered new concepts, such as isotopes, or simply introduced new techniques and proposals for the classification of new elements. The role of many women scientists who made very significant contributions to the study and search for new chemical elements is noteworthy. The two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie is always renowned among female scientists, but unfortunately the history of science has ignored the paper of many other women scientists who made contributions to the periodic system, such as Marie Anne Paulze-Lavoisier, Jane Haldimand Marcet, Julia Vsevolodovna Lermontova, Harriet Brooks, Ellen Gleditsch, Lise Meitner, Stefanie Horovitz, Ida Tacke Noddack, Irène Joliot-Curie or Marguerite Catherine Perey. Giving visibility to women researchers is one of the best ways to teach from an egalitarian point of view. For this reason, a set of educational proposals based on literature search have been created so that university students can reflect from a critical point of view and help to create a real image of the history of science, taking into account the historical and educational context