Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. – Finding Ada

As a social anthropologist with a minor in German literature I studied “typically female” subjects at uni – but I have always been interested in “male” subjects as well, and (not to belabour an obvious point, namely that the gendering of subjects is a societal construct) always had excellent grades in biology and chemistry during my school years (in physics and math I fluctuated between really bad and really good, depending on the topic). Thus I have always cheered (sometimes loudly, sometimes silently) when finding women’s names in connection with technological and scientific advances, knowing that it takes an extra bit of dedication and passion to succeed in male-dominated fields.

When it came to the Swiss equivalent of A-Levels (‘Matura’), we were allowed to choose our own topics for the oral History exam – and I, checking my bookshelf, picked Marie Curie, the woman famous for discovering (along with her husband Pierre Curie) radium and polonium and studied their radiation and the effect that radation had on tumours. As many of the great pioneers, she risked her life in the name of science and discovery and contracted aplastic anemia from prolonged exposure to radiation, of which she eventually died.

She was a truly impressive woman – both as a dedicated scientist (the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize, and she got two of them – first in Physics, then in Chemistry), as a working and successful mother of two daughters (the older one would later also win a Nobel Prize in Chemistry, the younger one write Marie Curie’s biography), and as a person of Polish decent living and working in France, exposed not just to sexism but also to xenophobia at various times during her life. Madame Curie definitely belongs on any list of great scientific minds, regardless of gender, and definitely on an occasion like Ada Lovelace Day…