Women of Innovation: Women Scientists

From Side Hustles to Empires - Histories of Women’s Working Lives, featuring a series of conversations between Dr Amy Edwards and a range of expert historians. In this episode this we’re going to take a look at the world of science, experiments, and scientific discovery. Although we might not consider scientists traditional entrepreneurs, they have often been lauded by society as innovators, as creators, and as performing a role not dissimilar to entrepreneurs. It’s also one of those worlds that we often associate historically with men. So to help us think about scientific research as work, and to unpick the role of gender in that field, we’re lucky to be joined today by Dr Andrew Flack.Dr Amy EdwardsAmy is a senior lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Bristol, where she has worked for the past 10 years. Her research focuses on how ‘ordinary people’ experience large economic changes and how people in the past worked, saved, spent, and invested their money. Her first book, Are We Rich Yet? Told the story of how the worlds of business and finance became part of our day-to-day culture. It looked at things like the business press, financial advice columns, investment based boardgames, and the popularity of the filofax in the 1980s. But more recently she has been carrying out a research project that looks at the lives of self-employed women from the 1950s to the 2000s. Dr Andrew FlackAndy is an environmental historian who studies the relationship between the human and non human animal world. His current project - and forthcoming book - looks at the ways that naturalists discovered new ways of trying to access and understand dark environments and the animals who inhabited them. Some of this work came from a recent project he ran which used histories of ability, technology, emotions and scientific discovery to help us think about our understandings of disability and ability today. The book is called Dark Natures: Finding Life in the Shadows, and I think it will be out in the coming year or so, and it’s going to be fabulous. See this and other episodes in the series at https://womensbusiness.club/s/voice