Girls‘ stuff and things

The German Digital Library

If you would like to find out more about women's suffrage in Germany, we recommend a search in the DDB. The German Digital Library provides a large number of search results on the subject of women's suffrage. A simple search provides access to leaflets, posters and writings that document the women's struggle for their right to vote. The set of hits can be further refined by setting specific filters by topic of interest. FIZ Karlsruhe is the technical operator of the German German Digital Library (DDB) and a partner within its competence network.

Women and mathematics

Time and again, the achievements of women are talked down, disregarded or dismissed as a fuss. The outstanding achievements of the early deceased Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani⁵ could not be put aside.  She was the first and only woman ever to receive the prestigious Fields Medal in 2014. This medal is considered to be the highest distinction in mathematics - and yet the religious authorities in their home country, Iran, found it difficult to fully appreciate their country's daughter, because in the press photos at the award ceremony she did not wear a headscarf, as is prescribed for all women in Iran. Maryam Mirzakhani's research topics, the chronological course of her research activities and the quotations of her works can be viewed online in the author's profile in zbMATH⁶. The author‘s profile also contains the interactive Wikidata Timeline, as partly shown in figure 2.

Women and research

Research and innovation go hand in hand. According to the latest data from the World Intellectual Property Organization WIPO, women are currently involved as inventors in 30.5 percent⁷ of the international patent applications filed through the organization. It is not self-evident that almost a third of international patents come from women, and the road to achieving this is a history full of obstacles and required many small steps. For a long time, women had been denied admission to a university and thus denied access to research. In 1896, the first women passed the Abitur examination at the Luisengymnasium in Berlin, but this did not yet mean they were admitted to a university. The opportunity for women in Germany to study opened up only slowly since the beginning of the 20th century. The forerunner here was the Grand Duchy of Baden, which by decree in 1900 allowed women to study at its universities, followed by Prussia in 1908.⁸ Admission to higher education was only the first hurdle that women willing to study had to overcome. It was important to survive in a male-dominated world and to fight for one's place in research and teaching. A strong percentage increase in female students at German universities was recorded during the Second World War, as can also be seen in figure 3. Indirectly, the war had a "positive influence" and resulted in women to make up to 45 percent of the students during this time, because their male fellow students were needed as soldiers for the war and withdrawn from the universities. In absolute terms, however, the number of female students was still very small. After the end of the Second World War, the number of women enrolled slowly picked up speed and increased steadily. Currently, the proportion of women at universities is about 50 percent, although the so-called STEM⁹ subjects still have a lower proportion of women on average. But it is precisely these courses of study that produce the future inventors.

Who would have thought a hundred 100 years ago that a woman’s invention could ever successfully enter a men’s world like that of the Latin American gauchos? What started with the first women at universities has become a success story for women in research, despite all political and social obstacles.

German text and search: Dr. Babett Bolle