page_title: List of female fellows of the Royal Society
hierarchical_section_title: List of female fellows of the Royal Society
caption_attribution_description: English: Female Fellows of the Royal Society elected from 2014 to 2018. Pictures uploaded as part of the Wikiproject Royal Society This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. Attribution: The Royal Society You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work to remix – to adapt the work Under the following conditions: attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original. This work is free and may be used by anyone for any purpose. If you wish to use this content, you do not need to request permission as long as you follow any licensing requirements mentioned on this page. Wikimedia Foundation has received an e-mail confirming that the copyright holder has approved publication under the terms mentioned on this page. This correspondence has been reviewed by an OTRS member and stored in our permission archive. The correspondence is available to trusted volunteers&#160;as ticket #2014062710019796. If you have questions about the archived correspondence, please use the OTRS noticeboard. Ticket link: https://ticket.wikimedia.org/otrs/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom&amp;TicketNumber=2014062710019796
context_page_description: Fellowship of the Royal Society is open to scientists, engineers and technologists from the United Kingdom and Commonwealth of Nations, on the basis of having made "a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science". Election to the Fellowship is highly regarded and sought after, bringing prestige to both the individual academically and the institution the Fellow is associated with. For scientists in the United Kingdom, the recognition is considered second only to being awarded the Nobel Prize.
  While there was no explicit prohibition of women as Fellow of the Royal Society in its original charters and statutes, election to the fellowships was for much of the Society's history de facto closed to women. As a result of the dissolution of nunneries in connection with the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, and female exclusion from schools and universities, the formal education of British girls and women was effectively non-existent throughout the 17th and 18th centuries.
context_section_description: Fellowship of the Royal Society is open to scientists, engineers and technologists from the United Kingdom and Commonwealth of Nations, on the basis of having made "a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science". Election to the Fellowship is highly regarded and sought after, bringing prestige to both the individual academically and the institution the Fellow is associated with. For scientists in the United Kingdom, the recognition is considered second only to being awarded the Nobel Prize.
  While there was no explicit prohibition of women as Fellow of the Royal Society in its original charters and statutes, election to the fellowships was for much of the Society's history de facto closed to women. As a result of the dissolution of nunneries in connection with the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII, and female exclusion from schools and universities, the formal education of British girls and women was effectively non-existent throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. Women slowly gained admittance to learned societies in the UK starting in the 19th century, with the founding of the Zoological Society of London in 1829 and the Royal Entomological Society in 1833, both of which admitted women fellows from their inception.
  The first recorded question of women being admitted to the Royal Society occurred in 1900, when Marian Farquharson, the first female fellow of the Royal Microscopical Society, sent a letter to the Council of the Royal Society petitioning that "duly qualified women should have the advantage of full fellowship". In its reply, the Council stated that the question of women fellows "must depend on the interpretation to be placed upon the Royal Charters under which the Society has been governed for more than three hundred years". When Hertha Ayrton was nominated for fellowship in 1902, her candidature was turned down on the basis that as a married woman she had no standing in law. The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 made it illegal for an incorporated society to refuse admission on the grounds of an individual's sex or marital status. While the Society acknowledged the provision of section 1 of the Act in 1925, in reply to a question originally put to them by the Women's Engineering Society three years prior, it was not until 1943 that another woman was nominated for fellowship. Kathleen Lonsdale and Marjory Stephenson were duly elected in 1945, after a postal vote amending the Society's statutes to explicitly allow women fellows.
  As of 2014, a total of 133 women have been elected fellows. Two women have been elected under the Society's former Statute 12 regulation and one Honorary Fellow for their service to the cause of science. Another four women, from the British Royal Family, have been either Royal Fellow or Patron of the Society. Of the approximately 1,600 living fellows and foreign members in 2018, 8.5 percent are women compared to 0.4% in 1945.
caption: Female fellows of the Royal Society elected from 2014 to 2018
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