Late, great engineers: Hertha Ayrton - pushing for engineering equality

More than a century ago, in 1919 the 52-year-old British engineer Hertha Ayrton outlined her position on the topic of women in engineering to a journalist from the Daily News. ‘I do not agree with sex being brought into science at all’, she is reported to have said: ‘The idea of “women in science” is completely irrelevant. Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not.’ Her husband, physicist and engineer William Ayrton, had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1881 and was the recipient of that body’s Royal Medal in 1901; and yet his wife, renowned for her work in electric lighting, never achieved the same status. As the Royal Society says, her ‘resounding call for equality slipped into obscurity.’ Not until more than two decades after her death would the Royal Society admit women as fellows.

One of the ‘great heroes’ of Girton – the first women’s college at the University of Cambridge – Ayrton was also, states the Girton website, a hero of ‘science itself and of mathematics’. Her entry goes on to explain that while the University was not able to award degrees to women, ‘Hertha went on to demonstrate that a woman was capable of excelling most of the men in her chosen fields, in spite of the institutionalised prejudice that tried to hold her back.’ It lists among her scientific achievements ‘the study of electric arcs, used in the late 1800s and 1900s for indoor and outdoor lighting’, becoming ‘the first woman elected to the Institution of Electrical Engineers’, and the invention of the Ayrton anti-gas fan that was intended to clear chemical weapons from frontline trenches during the Great War. The article also notes that she was ‘a stalwart of the women’s movement. She supported the suffragists and marched in all the suffrage processions.’