Abstract
The Geological Society of London has historically awarded medals and funds to early career geologists and for career achievement recognition. Mid-career and outreach awards were later added as categories. This paper will concentrate on early recipients of funds and medal winners mainly during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
In the nineteenth century, only two women received recognition by the Geological Society for their work through early career funds (not medals): Catherine Raisin in 1893 and Jane Donald in 1898.
From 1900 to 1919, no woman received a medal but funds were collected by men on behalf of Gertrude Elles, Elizabeth Gray, Ethel Wood, Helen Drew, Ida Slater and Ethel Skeat. The first woman to collect her own Fund was Ethel Skeat in 1908.
Pre-World War II, only four women received career recognition in the form of a medal. Gertrude Elles in 1919 and Ethel Shakespear in 1920 received the Murchison Medal. No further medals were awarded to women until Maria Ogilvie Gordon in 1932 and Eleanor Mary Reid in 1936. It was not until the end of the 1990s and into the twenty-first century that a significant number of women received medals. It is noted that the William Smith Medal was only received by a woman in 2019 and the Dewey Medal has yet to be received by a woman. An analysis of the different medals and funds awarded to females through the Geological Society is discussed in detail with snapshots of the women who were so recognized. As we move into the twenty-first century we see an increase in these awards to women.
The awarding of a professional society medal or fund is an honour given to few academics, experts or publicly minded individuals. It is a public acknowledgement of an achievement, often coming with financial benefit and can be regarded as peer recognition of a significant contribution to society either through research or outreach activities. During the nineteenth century, awarding this recognition to a female was unusual.
The Geological Society of London began its life in 1807 (Herries Davies 2007) and since 1831, when the Wollaston Medal and funds were first awarded, it has awarded 1423 medals and funds to date (January 2020). Of these, 110 recipients were women (7.7%), representing 5.3% of medal and 10.8% of fund winners. However, these percentages have dramatically changed over time (Fig. 1). A larger number of awards were given to women in the first 18 years of the twenty-first century than in the previous two centuries together.
Number of female awardees by century.
The disparity between genders is shown in Figure 2, and the length of time before the first medal or fund was awarded to a female is shown in Figure 3. The only woman to have been awarded two medals is Janet Watson (1923–85): the Lyell Medal in 1973 and the Bigsby Medal in 1965. Twelve women have received both a fund and a medal: Catherine Raisin (1855–1945), Gertrude Elles (1872–1960), Ethel Wood (Dame Shakespear) (1871–1945), Eileen Mary Lind Hendriks (1888–1978), Eleanor Reid (1860–1953), Helen Muir-Wood (1895–1968), Marjorie Chandler (1897–1983), Dorothy Hill (1907–97), Dorothy Rayner (1912–2003), Mabel Tomlinson (1893–1978), Dianne Edwards (1942–) and Jane Plant (1945–2016). Several of these women have individual chapters devoted to them within this volume of research and so will not be discussed in detail here.
Gender disparity in medal and fund distribution.
Number of years before first awarded to a female.
This paper will concentrate on the early years and first recipients of medal and fund awards to women, and although mention will be made of the success of the twenty-first century, for clarity and completion, it is not the main aim of this paper.
Geological Society medals and funds
The Geological Society awards a series of medals and funds based on different criteria. For all funds, the recipient ‘must be within ten years (or full time equivalent) of the award of their first degree in geoscience or a cognate subject’ (Geological Society of London website 2019).
The Wollaston, Lyell and Murchison funds are all awarded to contributors to the Earth Sciences on the basis of noteworthy published research. The William Smith Fund is awarded for excellence in contributions to applied and economic aspects of geoscience, which is in keeping with the work of William Smith himself. However, as the William Smith Medal and Fund were only initiated in 1977 and 1988, respectively, they have had fewer recipients of all genders and will only be discussed for completeness. The William Smith Fund has had six female recipients but it is significant that the William Smith Medal was awarded for the first time to a woman in 2019.
The medals and funds are also awarded for different aims and indeed they are informally ranked with the most prestigious award being the Wollaston as it is the oldest.
The criteria used are based on the career position of the person nominated. The citations for the Wollaston, Lyell, Murchison, William Smith, Prestwich, Sue Tyler Friedman and Dewey medals are career achievement recognitions. The Bigsby and Aberconway medals are for mid-career achievements, while the President's Award and all of the funds are for early career achievements. The Daniel Pidgeon Award is specifically for researchers under the age of 28 years (Burek 2009).
There are also recognition awards for other non-academic accomplishments. The Coke, Distinguished Service Award (DSA) and R.H. Worth are all outreach awards.
For clarity, Table 1 shows the initiation date of the medals and funds. This is important as many of them were not available in the nineteenth century and, indeed, some have only recently been started (e.g. The Dewey Medal in 2018). Bearing in mind that women in England and Wales were only allowed into universities to study geology from 1875, with the first graduations only occurring from 1878 (Burek 2007), the constraints on female numbers can be contextualized. Certainly, there were women acting in an amateur capacity before that date who contributed significantly to the advancement of geology; Mary Anning (1799–1845) is a good example. In Scotland the situation was different, and Archibald Geikie was one of the first to teach geology to women at Edinburgh University from 1888 (Burek 2019).
Geological Society medals and funds administered by the Geological Society, with their start dates
Thus, although the Awards list looks impressive, many of the early female geologists were restricted by their career opportunities to the medals and funds which were available to them because of the associated criteria attached to their eligibility for even being nominated. The positions available to qualified female geologists were severely limited before World War I, and the length of time needed to achieve recognition was normally longer than for men. For example, before 1885 you could not have achieved a mid-career achievement award if you had only graduated in 1878 as you needed time to develop your career. However, funds would have been available. Also, in order to produce published research it was often easier to read your paper to a professional society, conference or meeting, and be present to hear the subsequent discussion, criticism and comments. Although women were allowed into the library of the only professional geological society in Great Britain from 1904 (Herries Davies 2007) and occasionally to listen to papers at open meetings or the annual general meeting (AGM), their participation was restricted and they therefore lacked that informal networking available to their male colleagues (Burek 2007). It must be borne in mind here too that women were not elected as Fellows of the Geological Society until 1919 but some very capable women were given awards before this time.
All of this must be taken into account when analysing any data.
The awards process
It is appropriate to consider the award-giving process. Today (2020), there is a diverse committee made up of 14 members, five of which are female. The committee receives nominations for the awards according to the prescribed criteria. Several people are normally nominated for each medal. The citations are read and each medal nominee is debated among the members of the committee. Thus, although at the outset only men were awarded medals and funds – and for an unusually long period of time in the case of the Wollaston Medal – that is not to say that women were not considered. There could have been several factors which might have led to no successful female applications. Perhaps the nomination form was not up to scratch and the nominating individual did not put forward the case to the satisfaction of the rest of the committee. Perhaps the recipient declined the recognition – although I think this would be highly unlikely in the case of a woman who had worked hard to receive recognition, especially in the early days. A strong possibility is that before 1919 no woman would have sat on the Awards Committee. Thus, it may well be that women were just not as visible to the male members. Certainly, their networking circles would have been less visible if, indeed, they existed at all within geology.
The first female fund winners
Initially, women were only granted funds as a small recognition but mainly to encourage future research. This can be seen in several of the following citations. The address and monies were normally given to men who received the awards on behalf of the female recipient before women themselves were allowed to receive them. Often these men were co-authors, fellow research workers or, indeed in some cases, the professors that had taught the recipient (McKenny Hughes 1900).
The first woman to receive her own Murchison Fund award was Ethel Skeat in 1908. She was also the last woman to receive a fund for 10 years, as no woman received any recognition between 1908 and 1919. Eight women received funds from the Society before they were eligible to become Fellows (Burek 2009, p. 381).
Table 2 shows the complete list of funds for the Murchison, Lyell and Daniel Pidgeon awards which were given more than once during the period 1893–1918. The table is reproduced here from Burek (2009) with additions and amendments to help give context.
Funding awarded to early female geologists up until 1918
In the following sections the date of initiation of the Medal or Fund is in brackets following the name of the Fund or Medal for ease of reference.
Lyell Fund (1876)
The Lyell Fund is awarded to contributors to the Earth Sciences on the basis of noteworthy published research. It was 17 years before it was awarded to a woman. The first female winner was Catherine Alice Raisin. She received the Lyell Fund in 1893 at the age of 38.
Catherine Raisin obtained her BSc in both Geology and Zoology from University College London in 1884 working under Professor Thomas George Bonney (1833–1923), and thus fell just within the 10 year limit criterion. At the time of her award she was Head of two departments: Geology and Botany at Bedford College, London. She published important papers with assistance from her former lecturer, Professor Bonney, in 1887 on ‘Notes on the metamorphic rocks of South Devon’ (Raisin 1887) and 2 years later ‘On some nodular felstones of the Lleyn’ (Peninsula, North Wales) (Raisin 1889). In 1893, Catherine published her third paper ‘Variolite of the Lleyn and associated volcanic rocks’ (Raisin 1893a). In the meantime, she published a couple of papers in the Geological Magazine in 1891 and 1892 on serpentines and metamorphic rocks (Raisin 1891, 1892). All three papers published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London were read by Professor Bonney and, indeed, he received the Lyell award for her. It was worth £24.16s.3d, equivalent today to £3160.37.1
The citation for her award is given as:
The considerable number of papers which that lady has contributed, both to the Quarterly Journal of London Society and also to the ‘Geological Magazine’ – all within the last six years – is proof of her industry, while the papers themselves indicate an excellent knowledge of Petrology and a good eye for country. The Council, in making this Award, wish it to be regarded as an acknowledgement of past work, and at the same time as an encouragement for the future
(Hudleston 1893).
However, it is Catherine Raisin's written reply, communicated by Professor Bonney, which is interesting, bearing in mind that she is the first woman to have received any kind of recognition at all:
In addition to the personal honour, I welcome this recognition as an encouragement, not to myself only, but also to other women who are working at Geology and at different branches of natural science
(Raisin 1893b).
She acknowledges that other women are also perfectly capable of receiving awards for their work and even brings in Sir Charles Lyell as an advocate for women's intellectual capabilities for producing good scientific research:
It gives me also peculiar pleasure to receive an award associated with the name of Sir Charles Lyell, whose ‘Principles of Geology’ was one of the earliest books to arouse my enthusiasm in that subject, and who by the terms of his Bequest gave evidence of his interest in the intellectual work of women, and even anticipated that they might in the future take part in scientific investigations
(Raisin 1893b).
Catherine Raisin herself was a feminist, and always tried to forward the case for women in education, employment and in society at large (Burek 2007).
Catherine Raisin went on to receive a DSc in 1898 and became the first female Vice Principal of a college, a post which she held for 3 years. She published over 24 high-quality peer-reviewed journal articles on metamorphic petrology. She was, indeed, a worthy recipient of the first fund to be awarded to a woman by the Geological Society.
Murchison Fund (1873)
The Murchison Fund is awarded to contributors to the Earth Sciences on the basis of noteworthy published research. It was 25 years before it was awarded to a woman.
The first female recipient of the Murchison Fund was (Mary) Jane Donald (1856–1935) in 1898. The Fund was £28.14s.3d, equivalent to £3700 today.
Jane Donald was not a graduate but rather a 42 year old amateur collector living in Carlisle. She had published five papers with the Geological Society (Donald 1887, 1889, 1892, 1895, 1898a) on palaeontological topics mainly from the phylum Mollusca, especially Carboniferous gastropods, and these are mentioned in the citation for her award by Henry Hicks, the President. Interestingly, two of these papers dealt with the Murchisonia family of gastropods, so it seems eminently reasonable that Jane should have been awarded the Murchison Fund. The award was given to Mr. Newton, although her papers had all been read to the Society by her mentor, John George Goodchild FGS (1844–1906) of Her Majesty's Geological Survey, who himself had won the Wollaston Fund in 1874:
On the present occasion a lady who has attained distinction as a palaeontologist has been selected by the Council to receive an award from the Murchison Fund
(Hicks 1898).
Henry Hicks (1837–99), the President of the Geological Society, mentions Jane Donald's five Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London papers, as well as her foreign travels to private and museum collections where he says she is:
Untiring in her zeal in collecting information for future work… The Council hope it will be accepted, not only as a token of appreciation of the excellent work which she has already accomplished, but in the hope that it may be some incentive to her to continue her palaeontological researches among the Palaeozoic rocks
(Hicks 1898).
This citation highlights two important points. The first is the recognition of work done by a non-professionally trained geologist. The second is that the money is an encouragement as well as a prize. Both these things are evident in Jane's reply, read by Mr Newton:
The news came to me as a great surprise for I had previously deemed it no small honour that my papers should have been considered worthy of publication in the Quarterly Journal of the Society and this higher recognition will certainly prove an encouragement to further research and I hope better work
(Donald 1898b).
Jane Donald married at the age of 50 and outlived her husband (Dr Longstaff) by 14 years, living to the ripe old age of 79. She was the leading expert in the systematic palaeontology of the Murchisoniidae, Pleurotomariidae and Luxonematidae families of Gastropoda, and contributed significantly to our taxonomic understanding of the Gastropoda. Her meticulous drawings of the shells build on her early art training at the Carlisle School of Art, and the figures are both beautiful and accurate. Her extensive collection of recent shells is lodged with the British Museum in London.
Wollaston Fund (1831)
The Wollaston Fund is awarded to contributors to the Earth Sciences on the basis of noteworthy published research. This is the oldest (1831) and most prestigious of the funds. It was 73 years before it was awarded to a woman.
The first recipient of the Wollaston Fund of £34.6s.10d (£4136 equivalent today) was Ethel Wood in 1904.
Ethel Wood left Newnham College, Cambridge in 1895 after reading geology under Professor McKenny Hughes (1832–1917). She moved to Birmingham University as a research assistant to Professor Lapworth (1842–1920) in 1896. Here she published three important papers on the ecological context of graptolites, especially related to their advancement of knowledge on the stratigraphy of North Wales and the Welsh border area (Wood 1900; Elles and Wood 1901–18; Wood and Shakespear 1906). The 1906 paper was published jointly with her husband. At the time of her award, Ethel Wood was 39 years old and in the middle of researching for the monograph on graptolites under the guidance of Professor Lapworth. Her co-researcher was Gertrude Elles, who had won the Murchison Fund the previous year. However, it was the 1900 paper on the Ludlow Formation and its graptolites which was responsible for her receiving the Wollaston Fund in 1904. This excellent paper published in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London emphasized the value of using fauna to identify and classify an otherwise difficult sequence of Lower Ludlow mudstones.
As the Chairman, Vice President Sir Archibald Geikie, standing in for President Lapworth who was ill, stated when Professor Marr (1857–1933) received the award for Ethel:
[This is] an acknowledgement of the value of her contributions to our knowledge in the Graptolites and of the rocks in which these organisms occur. Her papers furnish an excellent example of the application of zonal stratigraphy to groups of rocks, which were thought to be already known with tolerable completeness. Much still remains to be done in the department of investigation. We had looked forward with pleasure to seeing her among us her today, but she has been unavoidably prevented from coming to London. In sending this Award to her you will be so good as to express to her our hope that she will regard it as a token of the interest which we take in her work, and as an encouragement to her to continue to devote herself in the cause of science with the same skill and enthusiasm which have hitherto so eminently distinguished her career
(Geikie 1904).
Examination of the letters available to me has not revealed the reason why Ethel was unable to attend. It is obvious from the quote above of the value placed upon her research and the encouragement the Society wanted to give to her.
Daniel Pidgeon Fund (1902)
This fund, named after Daniel Pidgeon (1833–1900), an engineer and Fellow of both the Geological Society and the Linnean Society, was set up in 1902 as defined by the Charity Commission in 1963 ‘to promote geological original research, grantees being not more than 28 years of age’, now interpreted as ‘early career’. The first female recipient of the fund was Helen Drew (1881–1927) in 1906. Interestingly, the Daniel Pidgeon Fund was given to another woman, Ida Slater (1881–1969), the following year (1907). So it was only 4 years before this fund was awarded to a woman.
Helen Drew was a student from Newnham College, Cambridge (1900–04) and an active member of the Sedgwick Club from 1902 to 1904, although she never presented a paper there. On passing her degree she went on to become a teacher, first in Bristol and then Croydon, Bradford, Newark and finally ending up in Colston's School, Bristol (founded in 1710). She never became a Fellow of the Geological Society but worked on palaeontological and stratigraphic research with Ida Slater, a fellow student at Cambridge with her (Sendino et al. 2018). They published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of London in 1910 on the rocks of Carmarthenshire (Drew and Slater 1910). Neither woman received their award in person, the monies being sent on to them. It seems that their research work merited further encouragement in the form of funds from the Geological Society, hence the two awards given in successive years to the two young women. This certainly seems to have achieved its aim in the aforementioned published paper in 1910. Drew died in 1927 at the age of 46.
Ida Slater is the subject of another chapter in this book and will not be discussed further. She became lost to geology after she married in September 1912 and moved to Sussex, as she did no further geological research.
R.H. Worth Award (1955)
This prize was initiated in 1955 for outstanding outreach activities. It was 6 years before a female won the award. The first female recipient was Mabel Tomlinson in 1961. The prize was worth £100, or £6755.55 in today's currency.
Mabel Tomlinson was 68, the same age as Marie Ogilvie Gordon (1864–1939), when she received the R.H. Worth prize. Tomlinson was one of the few women who received two acknowledgements for her work, as she was also awarded the Lyell Fund in 1937. The R.H. Worth Award is one of the prizes awarded to amateur geologists for outreach activities and recognizes Mabel Tomlinson's extraordinary gift not only as a teacher but also as a researcher. She effectively had two careers simultaneously. This is recognized in the citation she received from Sydney Hollingworth the President:
Dr. Tomlinson your extensive and thorough research on the Pleistocene succession and glacial history of the West Midlands has been of prime importance in the interpretation of what has developed into a critical area. The succession which you have erected for the Warwickshire area … has stood the test of time … The Society has published several of your major contributions and I personally … welcome the opportunity of presenting the Worth Prize on behalf of the Council to one of our most distinguished amateurs who has also given so much in encouragement to others [a reference to her enthusiastic teaching]
(Hollingworth 1961).
Mabel Tomlinson is the subject of another paper within this volume and will not be discussed further.
The first female medal winners
No female geologist was awarded a Geological Society of London medal during the nineteenth century or before 1919, the year when women were finally eligible to be elected for Fellowship. The first medal awarded was the Murchison Medal (Table 3). This had been first awarded in 1873 and it took 46 years for a woman to be considered suitable for it. However, this length of time pales in comparison with the Wollaston Medal which was first awarded in 1831 yet not awarded to a woman until 2014, a length of 173 years. Even allowing for the fact that women could not become Fellows until 1919, it seems inconceivable that no woman was considered suitable for this medal during the following 95 years.
First female award recipients up until 1990 (all fund winners included up until 1919)
Figure 3 shows the length of time which, on average, women had to wait to be awarded a named medal, the shortest time being the Daniel Pidgeon Fund at 4 years and the longest the Wollaston Medal at 173 years.
Murchison Medal (1873)
The Murchison Medal is normally given for contributions to ‘hard’ rock studies. It was established under the will of Sir Roderick Impey Murchison (1792–1871), the Scottish geologist who first described the Silurian and Devonian successions in Britain, among other achievements in a long and distinguished career. It took 46 years before this medal was awarded to a woman.
The Murchison Medal was the first medal to be given to a woman, and this was in 1919. The medal was awarded to Gertrude Elles, then 46, who had received the Lyell Fund in 1900. Interestingly, the medal had been established the year Elles was born. There have been very few women to receive both a fund and a medal from the Geological Society – only 12 in total to date.
Gertrude Elles is recognized as one of the greatest British Graptoloidea palaeontologists and her work is still regularly cited today, 60 years after her death (Burek 2014). The citation at her medal reception was as follows:
The Council desires to acknowledge the important and sustained efficiency of your efforts in advancing Geological Sciences
(Lamplugh 1920).
This is clearly a reference to both the publication of her Monograph on graptolites and also her lecturing position in Cambridge.
There have also been entries for her in the main Dictionary of National Biographies, as well as within the context of papers written by Burek (2007, 2009) and Creese and Creese (2009). There is a separate paper devoted to her within this volume and she will not be discussed further here.
Lyell Medal (1876)
The Lyell Medal is a prestigious annual scientific medal given by the Geological Society of London, equal in status to the Murchison Medal. It is normally given for contributions to ‘soft’ rock studies. It was established under the will and codicil of Sir Charles Lyell (1797–1875), the author of Principles of Geology, which popularized the idea of uniformitarianism.
The first female recipient of the Lyell Medal was in 1932, 56 years after it was initiated in 1876. The awardee was Maria Ogilvie Gordon, who was then 68. She was one of the first female Fellows of the Geological Society in 1919 and she is arguably one of the greatest Scottish geologists of the nineteenth century. She has entries in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Creese 1996) and the Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women (Burek 2018), and has been honoured in many ways not only for her geological research but also for her social and philanthropic work, especially concerning the League of Nations for which she received a DBE in 1935 (Wachtler and Burek 2007; Burek 2009). Her geological research on the Dolomites was recognized on the continent and she received many honorary awards from foreign institutions (Burek 2018) well before she had gained recognition in this country.
She commented on this isolation and lack of recognition by her own countrymen in her acceptance speech for the medal:
Mr. President, because my work had to be done outside Great Britain, and was humanly of so isolated a character, I derive very special pleasure today in this [Final] recognition from the geologists of my homeland
(Gordon 1932)
She had previously discussed her bitterness at the lack of recognition with Professor Lapworth in Birmingham, and with her Austrian friend and colleague Julius Pia (1887–1943) at the Vienna Natural History Museum:
In my own country I never count at all. I am made to feel a complete outsider
(Pia 1939)
and to Archibald Geikie (1835–1924), a fellow Scot and her mentor in many ways (Burek 2019). She attributed this lack of recognition to her working overseas and that nobody read her work in German or was interested in the Dolomite area. Certainly, her work would have been out of favour during both World War I and the interwar years due to its location. She is still recognized as a leading authority within her research area and has recently had a Triassic fossil fern named after her (Van Konijnenburg-Van Cittert et al. 2006; Wachtler 2016).
Bigsby Medal (1877)
This medal was first awarded in 1877 and thereafter every 2 years. It is awarded ‘as an acknowledgement of eminent services in any department of Geology, irrespective of the receiver's country’ but ‘[t]he recipient of the medal must have done no more than 25 years’ full-time equivalent research, thus probably not too old for further work and not too young to have done much’. It took 88 years before it was awarded to a woman.
In 1965, the first female recipient was Dr Janet Watson (1923–85) along with her husband Professor John Sutton (1919–92). She was 42. As she had gained her PhD in 1949, she had only lectured for 16 years at Imperial College London so by the terms of the medal requirement was well within the 25 year limit. Janet Watson is the only woman to have won two medals: the Bigsby Medal in 1965 and the Lyell Medal in 1977. She was, of course, the first female President of the Geological Society in 1982. Janet Watson received the medal on behalf of her and her husband. The President was Professor Fred Shotton (1906–90) from University of Birmingham.
The President's citation is addressed to both of them and towards the end it reads:
I should not omit reference to that most successful textbook, An introduction to geology, where for once Dr. Watson had a different collaborator Professor Read, if only to point out that the old publishing partnership has been reformed and we are eagerly awaiting your book on Metamorphic geology
(Shotton 1965).
Interestingly, the President concludes:
Eleven years ago the Society awarded to what are somewhat archaically termed ‘moieties’ of the Lyell Fund, and this occasioned no difficulties. There is, however, only one Bigsby Medal and its award to two persons might have produced a Gilbertian situation. We could have divided the medal into moieties, but would they have been exactly equal? and if they had not been, could I take the responsibility of deciding who should receive the better half? I decided that I could not and so, to avoid any possible confusion, I hand this medal, inscribed with the names of Janet V. Watson and John Sutton, to Mrs Sutton
(Shotton 1965).
The interest here is on two counts. Firstly, Shotton acknowledges equality and, secondly, he gives the medal to ‘Mrs Sutton’ rather than Janet Watson. So while, on the one hand, he acknowledges equality in research, on the other, he bows to the restraints of society by referring to her as a wife, using the title Mrs not even Dr.
In response to the citation, she replies:
Mr. President: I should like to thank you on behalf of both recipients for the award of this Bigsby Medal
(Watson 1965).
She thus diffuses the situation and makes no comment. However, the write-up states that it is Dr J.V. Watson that replies. An interesting comment on the times.
Prestwich Medal (1903)
This medal was first awarded in 1903 but is only awarded every 3 years. The award is ‘to persons who shall have done well for the advancement of the science of geology’ and is traditionally awarded in the area of Quaternary geology, archaeology or anthropology. It is worth noting that in 1909, Lady (John) Evans received it on behalf of her husband who had died in 1908. It was not received by a woman for her own work until 1969, when Mary Leakey (1913–96) became the 24th recipient. This is another instance of a significant delay, in this case 66 years, before a female was recognized for a medal.
Mary was 56 years old when she received the medal jointly with her husband, Louis Leakey. She was a palaeoanthropologist, although she had had no formal university training, and received the award for her work in the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa.
In 1996, Christine Mary Rutherford Fowler (1950–), while a lecturer at Royal Holloway College, was the second woman – and last to date – to be awarded this medal out of a total of 42 awards. She is now Master of Darwin College, Cambridge.
President's Award (1980)
President's Awards are conferred upon early career geoscientists who are within 8 years (full-time equivalent) of the award of their first degree in geoscience or a cognate subject, and who show significant early promise and are judged to have potential to be future leaders in their fields.
These awards were instituted in 1980 by Professor Percy Allen (1917–2008) and the awards are made annually at the discretion of the incumbent President. The President's Awards have a value of £250 each. It took 15 years before the first award was given to a female in 1995.
Alison R. Pawley, a Cambridge graduate, received the award 5 years after she obtained her PhD from Edinburgh University on experimental studies of amphiboles. After leaving Edinburgh, she spent time at the University of Arizona and briefly at the University of Bristol before moving to the University of Manchester in 1995, where she now researches in the area of experimental petrology.
For the next 3 years there was a female recipient of the President's Award (Elisabeth Parfitt, Lidia Lonergan and Sarah Gabbott). This award, the smallest of the monetary awards, is the one acknowledgment given to the most females (13) between 1995 and 2019 (Table 4).
Female winners of the Wollaston, Murchison, Lyell and President's funds
William Smith (1977), Aberconway (1992), Coke (1984), Sue Tyler Friedman (1988), Distinguished Service Award (1998) and Dewey (2018)
The above-named awards are all recent (initiated in the last 45 years) and they recognize the achievements of geologists in a wide range of activities. The criteria for selection are listed under each medal.
None of the above medals and awards has been given to a woman during the twentieth century. The Dewey Medal, only initiated in 2018, has not been awarded to a woman.
William Smith Medal (1977)
The William Smith Medal is awarded for contributions to applied or economic aspects of geoscience. It is named after the ‘Father of English Geology’, William Smith (1769–1839), maker of the first geological map of Britain and arguably the pioneer of applied geology.
Until 2019, no woman had ever won the William Smith Medal. In 2019, after the centenary celebrations of the first female Fellows of the Geological Society, and 42 years of male recipients, Frances Wall from the Cambourne School of Mines, at the University of Exeter, won the medal. She was recognized as:
[O]ne of our nation's leading economic geologists, carrying out research that is vitally important for modern technology
(Rogers 2019).
Dewey Medal (2018)
The Dewey Medal is awarded to a geologist who has made substantial and significant contributions to geology through sustained field mapping and/or field observation of rocks, and who has a strong record of training, leading and encouraging others to practise and pursue advances in geology by this means. It has not yet been awarded to a woman.
Distinguished Service Award (1998)
This award recognizes an individual who has made significant contributions to geoscience and the geoscience community by virtue of their professional, administrative, organizational or promotional activities.
The first female recipient for the Distinguished Service Award in 2001 was Margaret Johnston, European Union of Geoscientists Executive Secretary for her ‘unfailing commitment to bring geoscientists together’ [at the European level]. It had taken only 3 years for this award to be given to a woman but it was another 9 years before Margaret Wood (1938–), an igneous petrologist and geoconservationist, received it in 2010 (Fig. 4) for her work on Welsh geoconservation, particularly in relation to her capacity as Director of the UNESCO GeoMôn Geopark Anglesey and Welsh Regionally Important Geodiversity sites, as well as for her work on moon rocks back in 1970, the first person to work on them at Manchester University.
Margaret Wood receiving the DSA in 2010.
Sue Tyler Friedman Medal (1988)
This award is for distinguished contributions to the ‘History of Geoscience’. It was established in 1987 by Gerald Friedman (1921–2011) and the Northeastern Science Foundation of Troy, New York (an organization he founded). It is dedicated to his wife, Sue Tyler Friedman, in acknowledgement of her contributions to the history of geoscience.
The medal, which is not confined to those with a geoscience background or to Fellows of the Society, is awarded to an individual of any nationality. It is an award nominated by the History of Geology Group (HOGG) for an outstanding historian of science. It took 15 years before this medal was awarded to a female historian of science, despite it being established in recognition of one, and only three women have been awarded it to date.
In 2003, the first female recipient, Rhoda Rappaport (1935–2009), received the Sue Tyler Friedman Medal. She was the first appointment at Vassar in 1961 to lecture on the history of science. In 1981, having been appointed a Corresponding Member of the International Committee for the History of Geology (INHIGEO), she remarked with some dismay that:
[M]any geologists who enter the historical arena do so without any awareness that history, like the sciences, is a discipline and not a hobby where any idiosyncratic notion will pass muster. I have sufficient standing to be elected to INHIGEO, but this does not mean that my work is understood by a large part of the audience that would presumably be concerned about what I have written and expect to write
(Merrell 2010).
After thanking the Geological Society for honouring her, she explains this aspect further in her reply speech for the Sue Tyler Friedman Medal:
What may surprise you, however, is that this award has at last reconciled me to the fact that geologists, not historians, are the natural audience for my research.
Years ago, I had persuaded myself that the history of science could serve to bring together C P Snow's ‘two cultures’, and I set out as a missionary. I would surreptitiously teach some science to non-scientists, showing them that the study of nature is but one aspect of human history. The plan failed, as it has failed at American universities where historians of science, not welcome among historians, have formed their own academic departments. At Vassar my students came chiefly from the science departments, while my colleagues regarded me as a historian of the French Revolution
(Rappaport 2003).
Her citation for the Sue Tyler Friedman Medal praised her research in the study of geology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which was the crucial formative period just before the foundation of the Society:
Professor Rappaport's early work focused on the geological research of Antoine Lavoisier, which had ranked highly in the famous chemist's own evaluation of his achievements, but which had been largely overlooked by historians. Her first publications put that omission to rights, describing Lavoisier's pre-Revolutionary contributions to the mineral and geological surveys of France. She also showed how he had arrived at a subtle causal explanation of the Tertiary formations around Paris, using a then novel explanation based on what we would call transgression and regression.
Since then, Professor Rappaport has widened out her studies of the geological research of this period, centring on France, which was then the centre of the scientific world. Her papers have had an influence out of all proportion to their bulk. Her greatest contribution, her book entitled When Geologists were Historians [(Rappaport 1997)] is a superb survey of the practice of Earth sciences across Europe from the time of the foundation of scientific societies and academies in the late 17th Century to the age of Buffon.
Rhoda Rappaport, for a research career that has thrown light on a remarkably fertile period in our science's history – a period when it can truly be said that new concepts modern geology takes for granted as its foundation stones were first conceived – I am pleased to award you the 2003 Sue Tyler Friedman Medal of the Geological Society
(Moody-Stuart 2003).
Rappaport's scholarship was supported over the years by fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies. She published widely in such journals as History of Science, The British Journal for the History of Science and Isis. Her last publication was in 2007 (Merrell 2010).
Two years later, Ursula Bailey Marvin (1921–2018) was the second recipient of the medal for her popularizing of the history of the science:
[A]s well as advancing the cause of women in science. She cultivated the global community by serving two terms as Secretary-General of the International Commission on the History of Geological Sciences. Over the course of her career, she has written or co-authored more than 180 research papers and, although she retired in 1998, she continues to produce major papers on historical subjects every year
(Styles 2005).
In 2012, Cherry Lewis (1947–) received the award for her outstanding contribution not only to the development of the history of geology within the Geological Society and as Chair of HOGG 2004–07 instrumental in the bicentenary celebrations, but also for her research on Arthur Holmes and her book The Dating Game: One Man's Search for the Age of the Earth (Lewis 2000).
Coke Medals (1984)
There are two Coke Medals named for the brothers Majors John and Edward Coke. The full title of the award is The Major John Sacheverell A'Deane Coke and Major Edward D'Ewes Fitzgerald Coke Medals. These two brothers were both killed at the Battle of Arnhem in 1944. The awards were a result of a legacy from their cousin, Lieutenant Colonel Basil Elmsley Coke (1884–1970), on the death of his daughter which occurred in 1982. These medals can be awarded for services to geology which can include administrative roles or even promotional activities resulting in benefits to the community. They may be given to people who are not professional geologists but whose expertise has a significant benefit to geology. They were first awarded in 1984.
In 2006, 22 years after their initiation, one of the Coke Medals was awarded to Marjorie Wilson (1951–) for her 50 research papers, major textbook on igneous petrogenesis and for her 12 years as executive editor of the Journal of Petrology. The second medal to be awarded to a female was 3 years later. Jane Plant (1945–2016) received the medal in recognition of her 30 years at the British Geological Survey as an Expert Environmental Geochemist, eventually becoming Chief Scientist, before moving onto Imperial College as Professor of Geochemistry. Unusually, in 2014 two women were awarded both medals, Jane Francis (1956–) and Christine Peirce.
Jane Francis's reply to the President, Mr David Shilston, is interesting as it highlights the difficulties for women in the 1970s and emphasizes the importance of keeping women in the geological sciences:
I started my career in geology in the mid-70s when I graduated from the University of Southampton. It was tough for women geologists at that time. I remember well an advert for core-logging geologists – at the bottom of the page it said, ‘Women need not apply’ (the work was usually on oil rigs or in the Middle East). I was close to accepting a position in a company outside geology when a PhD on the Purbeck rocks of southern England saved me. I am therefore particularly pleased that this has subsequently led to my position as the first woman director of the British Antarctic Survey. I work with some outstanding female PhD and postdocs and we still need to do all we can to keep them in science
(Francis 2014).
The same happened in 2016 when two women were again recognized for their work and both received Coke Medals. Monica Grady (1958–) for:
[H]er extensive work on meteorites, but her contribution to the public understanding of science is also outstanding, having made her one of this country's best-known female scientists. She has been President of the Society for Popular Astronomy and has also delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures to Young People
(Manning 2016)
and Patience Cowie (1964–) as an:
[A]n inspirational and far-sighted geoscientist, who has revolutionized our understanding of the growth and interaction of faults. You have also made significant contributions to the geological community, not least as Editor of Geology
(Manning 2016).
Thus, with Sarah Davies in 2015 for her internationally recognized work in sedimentology and distribution of organic matter through the geological column, as well as her work on the Deep Sea Drilling Project, a total of seven women have been awarded this medal since the turn of the twenty-first century.
Aberconway Medal (1992)
The Aberconway Medal was established by a donation from the English China Clays Ltd in 1992. This award is normally given to persons with ‘no more than 25 years’ full-time equivalent experience’ and ‘recognizes distinction in the practice of applied or economic geoscience with special reference to work in industry’, and so it is classified as a mid-career award. The medal is awarded every 2 years. In 2011, it was awarded to Rebecca Jane Lunn, a Cambridge graduate with a PhD from Newcastle University (1996) for modelling large drainage basins. From there she moved to the University of Edinburgh, then Heriot Watt University, and then, finally in 2011, moving to Strathclyde to become Professor and the first woman to Head an engineering department in Scotland. The Aberconway Medal was the first in her impressive list of recognitions culminating in 2017 with an MBE for her work. She now heads up the Centre for Ground Engineering and Energy at the University of Strathclyde. Only two women have received the medal out of the 25 awarded to date (Table 5); Charlotte Adams was awarded it in 2018 for her research at the Durham Energy Institute on low-enthalpy near-zero carbon geothermal energy in the UK, and for her work which bridges the gaps between academia, industry and society.
List of all the female medal winners
Discussion
Table 3 shows the distribution of all female recipients of funds up until 1919 and, after that date, the first female recipients of awards and medals up until 1990. This was examined to see if any patterns emerged as to status, discipline or age of the women involved.
There would appear to be no obvious pattern for early female award winners, although most of the first fund winners were single. Not all winners were, or went on to become, Fellows of the Geological Society. There seems to be no pattern to the distribution of awards to females, just as there was no pattern for the first female Fellows of the Geological Society as discussed by Burek (2009). The recipients’ ages varied between 25 and 72 for the first eight female fund winners, and between 42 and 68 for the first five female medal winners. They were from different research areas within geology, although, as we have seen, the majority of the early women were palaeontologists. They were not all professionally trained geologists and towards the end of the twentieth century, we see a broader range of skills being recognized including outreach, editorial and administration prowess. This broader range, one could argue, recognizes the skills often associated with female geologists.
The awarding of six funds and 10 medals by the Geological Society of London is admirable. The range of awards is broad but historically these awards have gone to one gender predominantly. This can be understood in the context of what we know of the attitudes of Victorian and then Edwardian Society towards women. With the passing of the UK Sex Discrimination Act in 1975, in an attempt to enforce gender equality and noting that this was not an enabling Act like the 1919 one, can we say that the research rewarding has been equitable? Unfortunately, the Geological Society fund and medal awards mirror the whole Geosciences discipline itself, which for many years has been male dominated. So, the answer is no. Before 1975 a case could be made to see this bias in the light of the social norms of the day. Since then, definitely not. The difficulty for women is that the Geological Society of London has been dominated by a male hierarchy for centuries, during which time it did not and, it is possible to argue, still does not take women's research and contributions seriously. However, this is slowly changing.
It is likely that the gender make-up of the Awards Committee influences the number of female nominations. Has this changed with time? Over the past decade there has been a slight increase in the ratio of women to men. When Professor Lynne Frostick was President of the Geological Society (2008–10) she asked me to serve on the Medals and Funds Awards Committee. We were 11 committee members (with two administrative attendees, one male and one female) but only two female academics. By July 2011, we were 13 academics but still only two female assessors. The ratio of women/men on the Medal and Fund Awards Committee in 2019 was 5/14 academic members. So there has been a change through time, from 15 to 36%, but we are dealing with small numbers. At least the number of female academics has risen over the past decade. With an increase of female participation on the Awards Committees perhaps we may see a change, although without female nominations this will not happen. You can only judge what you are given. So it is up to the membership to nominate suitable female recipients.
In contrast, an analysis of the medals data indicates that at last the tide is starting to turn (Fig. 5). Figure 5 compares the percentage of the total female medal winners with the percentage of those obtained during the twenty-first century. We can see that all percentages have increased, except for the Prestwich Medal which, although only given every 3 years, has had no female recipients in this century. The only award to have decreased during this time is the R.H. Worth Award, given for outstanding outreach activities, perhaps because during the second half of the twentieth century women were more able and willing to undertake additional voluntary activities outside their employment as machines took over the duties of housework. Thus, they were more readily recognized for their contributions to these sometimes voluntary activities. Table 6 shows all the women that have received the R.H. Worth prize, many of whom have been recognized for their more unusual contributions. It must be mentioned here that the 2018 award went not to a person but a group, Girls into Geoscience, which surely is a step in the right direction. It shows the increasing recognition of STEM activities to encourage girls into science which had become a recognized UK Government educational strategy (Department of Education 2011).
A comparison of the twenty-first century with all the female medal and fund winners.
Female recipients of the R.H. Worth Award
Looking at the Sue Tyler Friedman Medal, there have been three awards to women since 1988 out of 22, which is only 14% but all were given in the twenty-first century (Table 5). The same is true of the Distinguished Service Award (Table 7), in that all four were given in the twenty-first century.
Female Distinguished Service Award (DSA) winners
While the percentage of medals awarded to women has increased significantly, the funds have not. This is because there were more funds given to women in the twentieth century, with the first two awards actually being given in the nineteenth century. Table 4 shows the 41 female winners of the three main funds, the Wollaston, Murchison and Lyell, to 2019 and also shows the President's Award. Figure 6a–c shows the Lyell, Murchsion and Wollaston medals themselves, with the profiles and stylization of the achievement of the particular geologist it is named after.
(a) The Lyell Medal. (b) The Murchison Medal. (c) The Wollaston Medal.
Female fund recipient numbers have begun to increase in the twenty-first century, with the highest percentages now awarded by the Lyell Fund at 55% and the William Smith Fund at 33%. However, it is the Lyell and the Murchison funds that show the biggest female percentage increase as we progress through the twenty-first century.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women had to be truly amazing and achieve great things beyond their capabilities, as perceived by both society at large and the Geological Society, in order to gain recognition from the prime professional geological body in the country in the form of money or medals. Initially, funds were awarded to female geologists by the Geological Society, and only later were medals awarded. After women achieved the right of full fellowship in 1919 did this change? Not really, as society itself needed time to change its views. After World War II did this change? The data show that it did not. After the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act did it change? Again, the answer has to be no. It is only with the coming of the twenty-first century that we can see a positive change. This is to be welcomed. We can highlight the fact that the first woman received the William Smith Medal in 2019, after it had been in existence for 42 years. However, the length of time it took for the Wollaston Medal to be awarded to a woman (Maureen Raymo) in 2014 (173 years) is deplorable.
So it behoves us all to fix the imbalance seen here and put the record straight by nominating worthy women. We applaud the women that rose above the parapet and received awards. Their acceptance speeches are also interesting, ranging from sheer joy (Donald 1898b) to condemnation of how long it has taken for their research to be recognized (Gordon 1932). They deserved the accolades and I hope I have done some of them justice in my analysis of their achievements. Catherine Raisin, the first award winner in 1893, summed this up by saying she was recognizing this:
[A]s an encouragement, not to myself only, but also to other women who are working at Geology and at different branches of natural science
(Raisin 1893b).
Invisibility during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a real problem, with women denied ownership of their work by husbands and/or colleagues. They often became invisible and were forgotten when they married and lost their maiden names. This is highlighted in several case studies within this volume. For example, Maria Ogilvie Gordon caused a real problem to the Geological Society who published her work when she married and changed her name as she was already a published author. Jane Donald had the same dilemma when she published after she married. An acceptable solution to the difficulty was debated by the Geological Society publishing body as to how to deal with this issue, as has been discussed in Burek (2009). Eventually both names were used but with one in brackets. Generally, this invisibility meant they could not be recognized for medal or fund nomination.
Conclusions
In the first two centuries covered by this paper, women were not expected to achieve greatness; gender discrimination in society was rife. Education, research opportunities and job prospects were very limited. Equally problematic was that female expectations were low. However, there were some remarkable women who rose above this bias from all levels of society to really contribute to the advancement and development of geology by producing exceptional work, published and cited even today. A few were rewarded by Geological Society funds and medals but not many.
Slowly this is changing as we move through the twenty-first century but we still do not have equality of opportunity, even after legislation was passed over a generation ago (1975). The barriers to receiving recognition through medal and fund awards seem to have been, not the Geological Society per se but society at large. Society's attitudes are slow to change. Often, it is ignorance, lack of expectation and lack of suitable role models that creates a huge challenge.
The correct entitlement of research work is something that must change for all our sakes. We still see the effects of the legacy of missed recognition and inappropriate acknowledgements even today. Copyright law, intellectual ownership and data protection legislation may help here but they are relatively recent additions and sometimes difficult to police. As the percentage of women working in the geoscience increases, a greater proportion of them will seek professional recognition by the recognized national geological professional body in the UK, the Geological Society of London. A greater acknowledgement of female achievement through fund and medal awards must be forthcoming by this august body. Acknowledgement and recognition of achievement is surely of benefit not only to the individual but also to mentors, mentees and to society as a whole. We must all recognize this and initiate change.
Acknowledgements
I would like to dedicate this paper to all fund and medal award winners of the Geological Society of any gender. That is equality.
My thanks go to Wendy Cawthorne of the Geological Society, to the archivist Sue Stanbury at the North London Collegiate School and to Cherry Lewis who spurred me on to write this paper, as I had been thinking about this topic for the last 11 years. I would also like to thank my reviewers for their comments which has made this a much better paper. Finally, my thanks go to my husband, Dr John Cubitt, for his forbearance with my obsession with the lives of early female geologists and striving for equality across the generations.
Author contributions
CVB: conceptualization (lead), data curation (lead), formal analysis (lead), investigation (lead), methodology (lead), resources (lead), writing – original draft (lead), writing – review & editing (lead).
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Data availability statement
Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
Footnotes
↵1 All conversions are given using the Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation rate. This averages out at 3.84% for the years in question.
- © 2020 The Author(s). Published by The Geological Society of London. All rights reserved
References
Female medal and fund recipients of the Geological Society of London: a historical perspective
- Article
- Abstract
- Geological Society medals and funds
- The first female fund winners
- The first female medal winners
- William Smith (1977), Aberconway (1992), Coke (1984), Sue Tyler Friedman (1988), Distinguished Service Award (1998) and Dewey (2018)
- Discussion
- Conclusions
- Acknowledgements
- Author contributions
- Funding
- Data availability statement
- Footnotes
- References
- Figures & Data
- Info & Metrics