This is an old picture of Science back when she was a woman. Fancy that! How did she lose her job? Well, the herstory of gender and science is a complicated subject, women have had more ups and downs in herstory than are advertised in Hollywood remakes.
In her book The Mind Has No Sex? Londa Schiebinger shows that the changes brought by the Enlightenment, including rebellion against aristocratic rule and formation of the first professional academies and associations for scientists, wiped out the established niches for educated and active women of the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Reformation led to the decline of convent schools where girls had been taught math and science by nuns, the newly-formed professional organizations and academies did not offer membership to the women who had achieved advanced schooling, and astronomy and biology shifted from craft guilds where women had gained footholds to the universities and professional academies where women were made absent by design. So the active participation of women in science, at least in Europe, was actually measurably decreased by the Reformation and Enlightenment.
Never underestimate the power of a backlash, grrls!
Another favorite author on the subject of gender and science is Evelyn Fox Keller. You can search her bibliography at the UC Irvine Critical Theory Institute. I loved her first book Reflections on Gender and Science partly because she exposed Joseph Glanvil, a noted mechanical determinist of Newton's time, as a witch hunter whose inflammatory writings on the powers of the laws of physics in identifying witches helped send many innocent women to their deaths in the 17th century.
Reflections on Gender and Science is a small but very dense collection of painstakingly thought-out essays on what science is and how could it possibly be influenced by gender. Her insight into the quandaries offered by the main schools of interpretation of quantum mechanics reduces entires piles of popular paperbacks on the subject to sawdust in a few elegant pages.
Another one of the dangerous feminists out there making us think about what we do and why we do it is Sandra Harding, author of The Science Question in Feminism, The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Race, Gender, and Science) and other works.
Nancy Cartwright is a philosopher of science and author of How the Laws of Physics Lie, and Nature and Her Capacities and Their Measurement.
And here are some wonderful links:
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