 I got into science by festival doing a degree in psychology and that degree is quite biologically oriented so I became more and more interested in the brain and decided to do a PhD in neuroscience. I'm a professor of physics. I research a lecture in physics in Cambridge. My actual area of research is what's known as soft matter physics which is pretty much physics of everyday stuff like food and animals plants and plastics. It was only when I left school at the age of 18 and started to work in labs and then do my degree. That's when I started to realise that there was this stereotype. There was this attitude that it was unusual for a woman to be doing science. Having a female physics teacher at my school was really important because it enabled me to imagine going on with physics and having high quality physics teaching. I think it was rather a surprise to my family that this was what I wanted to do. The idea that a girl could want to do physics, it's just not talked about enough. The Royal Society was founded over 350 years ago and of course there was only men doing science and philosophy around them. I don't think it's necessarily the case that anyone wrote down that women could not become fellows. It was simply that they didn't get that opportunity. Society was organised in ways that implicitly were sexist. Women would not have been expected to be engaged in discussion in public places. I think that just would have been seen as rather odd. This is an early paper by Hatteron on the Electric Arc which she wasn't allowed to read. It had to be read by a sort of sponsor for her. She was nominated to become an FRS and there were many people who signed the nomination form. She was nominated and was declined on the grounds that she was married and yet they awarded her a prize. They gave her the huge medal. It's a horrible thing to happen that because you are married you are not eligible. Despite the fact that lots of men fully recognised her ability and the excellence of the science she was doing, we have moved on since then. Publishing is a huge part of the scientist's life because until you publish you can't claim to have discovered something if you like. The trouble is historically to publish in the Rossati journals you had to have an FRS, a fellow Rossati, who would submit it. So if you were a woman and not moving in the sort of charm circles of other FRSs that must have been much harder. So this is Alice Lee's paper about brain science and intelligence. Alice Lee was really interesting. She was working in the late 19th, early 20th century on the relationship between the size of the skull and intelligence. So she had all these sophisticated measures of how to measure the capacity of the skull. Interestingly she didn't really have any very sophisticated measures of intelligence. So she just assumed that if you were at UCL you were intelligent? Well she did divide students up into high intelligent, average and dull. Dull? But just according to her subjective judgment. It was previously believed that intelligence was related to skull size and that men have bigger skulls than women on average. So men are more intelligent than women on average and she just proved that in her paper. She mentions names. That must have been quite an issue. It would never happen now. You would just be subject one or something. Exactly. So she was able to say that even her supervisor Pearson's brain was not that big. Not particularly big. Despite his great brain. The Sex Disqualification Act was introduced in 1919, which meant at that point that the Royal Society couldn't explicitly exclude women. But the first women weren't elected until 1945. And it meant it was possible that other women could aspire to this. Because up till that point they must have wondered if ever the society would let women in. This is an early paper by Kathleen Lomsdale quite a long time before she was elected. 1929. A paper on benzine. I think some derivative for benzine to crystallise so she could work out its structure. Her election was along with Marjorie Stevenson so the power of them got elected together. Amazing. But possibly also intimidating. I expect she might have been used to that. She probably was used to it. I expect she was always in a minority of about one. These are the certificates so they've had to cross out his and writing her as deserving that honour. Lots of people signed up to recommend them. They only needed six I think. They were originally proposed in 1944 so it took two years. I've been on several different committees at the Royal Society and they've all had a really good proportion of women on them. So from what I see of the Royal Society it's not this kind of bastion of male dominance at all. I've always found the Royal Society incredibly welcoming. I was made a fellow in 1999 and that was the year five women were elected. And it was the largest number that had been up till then. An awful lot of them are people you've never heard of. I think they were just wealthy people rather than good scientists. Men in weeks. Men in weeks, absolutely. The Royal Society is trying really hard to improve its image, to improve the message it gives. The rehanging of the portraits is part of that to change the imagery in this building because there is no doubt it has had a very old-fashioned all-male look to it. Of course there are the new portraits which are going to be hung around the Royal Society and we've got three of them here. And this is Sinetra Gupta, who's a mathematical epidemiologist from Oxford. Francesca Hape, who's a professor of psychology. She's an expert on autism. So this last one is the portrait of me. Fantastic. And this will be hung here too. Yeah, so hopefully when they rehang these paintings they'll also add more of other women. So that when people come into the society they realise that women are welcome. Women are scientists too and it really does make a difference. It makes these kinds of particular images. Exactly, where you can really have an impact. Nothing happens quickly, but the more women publishing in science and then becoming FRSs would have encouraged younger women to see women can take part in science too and reach the highest echelons of scientific society becoming FRSs.