Laura Bassi: 18th century Scientist and Academician Extraordinaire
On a recent trip to Milan, we stumbled upon a street named for 18th century female scientist Laura Bassi, reminding us that women have been accomplishing extraordinary things in STEMM for hundreds of years. Too few women have had such an opportunity.
By Patricia A. Maurice and Janet G. Hering
24 June 2025, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15675789
Through most of human history, and even in many modern-day cultures, women have been excluded from studying and practicing STEMM. Because of this, it’s easy for young girls and boys to imagine that women either do not have the mental acuity to pursue STEMM and/or that they are so unwelcome that they shouldn’t even bother to try. Every now and then, something reminds us that women have excelled at STEMM for generations, when they are given the chance and despite enormous barriers.
Earlier this year, we met in Milan, Italy for a few days and stumbled upon the name of another famous female scientist from the past, Laura Bassi, by way of a street sign (see photo above). We were embarrassed not to have recognized her name.
According to the University of Bologna’s official web pages, Laura Bassi was born in Bologna in 1711 and was privately educated as a young woman. She went on to study at the university in Bologna. In her ‘annus mirabilis’ 1732, she had several remarkable accomplishments:
In March, the twenty-one-year-old was made an honorary member of the city’s science academy; in April, she presented her theses and took a degree in philosophy, also becoming an honorary member of the College of Philosophers; in June, after the discussion of additional theses, she was granted another university teaching qualification; in October, she was given an honorary post in natural philosophy and, in December, she held her first lecture at the Archiginnasio [1].
She eventually married a fellow academic (and physician, Giuseppe Verrati), founded the Bassi-Verrati laboratory with her husband, and gave birth no less than eight times. In 1776, she was finally granted a post of Professor of Experimental Physics at the Istituto delle Scienze [2]. Unfortunately, she died only two years later. During her lifetime, she helped to develop a program in experimental Newtonian physics which was groundbreaking in the 1700s [2].
Nearly 250 years since Laura Bassi first became a Professor of Experimental Physics, we might ask how women in Physics are doing today. In her native Italy (which wasn’t a nation in 1776), 32% of university graduates in Physics were women in 2015. But, in 2016, only 11% of Full Professors were women, along with 21% of Associate Professors and 26% of academic Researchers [3].
According to a 2019 Nature article that focused on women in Physics worldwide, “The percentage of women in post-graduate Physics positions has stalled just below 20%.” This includes just 16% of faculty in both the US and Germany and only 11% in the UK [4].
Last year, we wrote about another famous Italian woman physicist, Prof. Marcella Carollo, who became, in 2019, the first ETH Zurich professor ever to be fired [5]. Her dismissal followed a deeply flawed investigative process after a student filed a complaint that, in and of itself, was not properly investigated. One of the most heartbreaking aspects of her dismissal was that even in the 21st century, women in Physics remain rare, especially at the rank of full Professor. We fear that her dismissal will discourage young women from pursuing academic careers in Physics and related fields.
You can read about Laura Bassi’s life and many accomplishments online. Whether or not you already knew about this brilliant and pioneering18th-century female scientist, please spread the word. We can also be encouraged by stories about other historical female pioneers in science shared by Ada Lovelace Day [6] on bluesky [7] and LinkedIn [8]. If you haven’t seen it, the 2016 movie “Hidden Figures”, which tells the true story of three African-American women who helped decipher and define the mathematics used during the space race in the 1960s, is truly inspirational [9].
It’s easy to find discouraging news about women in STEMM, so it’s important to revel in the great accomplishments of women who broke barriers, even if those barriers needed to be broken again generations later. In the spirit of Laura Bassi, we must continue to push the boundaries for women in STEMM, and work to ensure that once a woman has attained substantial success, she is not knocked down by a flawed system.
Questions for further thought
· Did you already know about Laura Bassi? If so, how did you first hear about her?
· What other female scientists of bygone days do we need to highlight?
· What can we do to ensure that the barriers we have worked to break down do not rise up again to prevent future generations of women from pursuing education and careers in STEMM?
References
[1] https://www.unibo.it/en/university/who-we-are/our-history/famous-people-and-students/laura-bassi
[2] https://physicsworld.com/a/laura-bassi-and-the-city-of-learning/
[3] Antolini, R., Cenci, P., Croci, S., Leone, S., Masullo, M.R., Picardi, I., Trinchieri, G. (2019) Women and physics in Italy: Numbers, projects, actions. AIP Conf. Proc. 2109: 050023. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5110097
[4] Skibba, R. Women in physics. Nat Rev Phys 1, 298–300 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-019-0059-x
[7] https://bsky.app/profile/adalovelaceday.bsky.social