Every year, on February the 11th, we celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, declared by the General Assembly of the United Nations in 2015 in order to promote full and equal access to science, technology, and innovation to women of all ages.
With the occasion of this special date, I have decided to write about three women that were pioneers in different fields of science and technology.
Valentina Tereshkova (1937-) has been the first woman to travel into space. On the 16th of June 1963, she started her mission on Volstok 6, space flying for 23 hours and 12 minutes. She collected data on the reactions of her body during the flight and took pictures of the planet Eearth, which were very important to determine the composition of the atmosphere. She had started the training together with other 4 candidtes, chosen among more than 400 women that had applied to the call of the Soviet government.
Eva Mameli Calvino (1886-1978) was the first woman in Italy to become a University teacher. She graduated both in Mathematics at the University of Cagliari in 1905 and in Natural Science at the Univeristy of Pavia in 1907. In 1915 she started teaching Botanics at the University of Pavia. In 1920 she married Mario Calvino and the moved to Cuba, where she worked as head of the department of Botanics at the Agricultural Experimental Station of Santiago de las Vegas, of which her husband was the director. During her stay in Cuba, her research activity focused on industrial crops such as tobacco (expecially the havanensis variety) and sugar cane; she was also a promoter of female scientific education. Five years later she went back to Italy; she was the director of the Botanic Garden of Cagliari and of the Floriculture Experimental Station in Sanremo.
Rosalind Franklin (1920-1959) was the researcher in physical chemistry who took the X ray pictures of DNA determinant for the discovery of the double helix. In 1951 she started her research about the structure of DNA at King’s College in London with Maurice Wilkins and Raymond Gosling. They worked out that DNA could exist in two different conformations, but they were not able to determine its exact structure. At the same time, James Watson and Francis Crick were working on the same topic at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. In January 1953 Wilkins showed to Watson Franklin’s X ray pictures of DNA without asking her permission; the access to those unpublished data helped Watson and Crick in the final elaboration of their model. The papers of both groups were published in the same issue of Nature in April 1953. In 1958 Rosalind Franklin dead of ovarian cancer. Four years later, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins received the Nobel Prize for Medicine; Rosalind Franklin was not included since the Nobel statute does not admit posthumous awards.
https://www.un.org/en/observances/women-and-girls-in-science-day
https://www.esa.int/About_Us/ESA_history/50_years_of_humans_in_space/First_woman_in_space_Valentina
https://www.nasa.gov/mediacast/valentina-tereshkova-and-sally-ride-women-space-pioneers
“Expediente Sra Eva Mameli de Calvino” utile e forestiera botanica a Cuba, Secci M. C., Centroamericana 2014 http://www.centroamericana.it/2015/07/09/volumen-24-22014/
The double helix and the ‘wronged heroine’, Maddox B., Nature 2003 http://doi.org/10.1038/nature01399
Rosalind Franklin and the discovery of the structure of the DNA, Klug A., Nature, 1968 https://doi.org/10.1038/219808a0
Molecular configuration in sodium thymonucleate, Franklin R. et al., Nature, 1963 https://doi.org/10.1038/171740a0
Virus&Co. 
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