Do it all, have it all

Maggie Aderin-Pocock, MBE, is a space scientist and communicator, who builds instrumentation for telescopes intended, she says, “to look to the edge of the universe”. Marie Curie (1867-1934) was a Polish-born, double Nobel-winning physicist and chemist. The first person to describe the nature of radioactivity, she discovered the elements polonium and radium.
I’d known for years that Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel prize—and is still the only woman to win two—but it wasn’t until very recently that I learnt about some of the challenges she faced. Her husband and collaborator, Pierre Curie, died when her children were still quite young, and she found being a working mother so hard that her father-in-law had to step in to run the household. And then there was a bit of a scandal because she began writing love letters to a married man. When I first found out about all this I thought: “That’s not the Marie Curie I knew”—but in fact I liked it. It made her more human.
Before that, I just assumed that Curie did it all. That’s the story we often get told: that high-achieving women are just brilliant, they’re superwomen, they do it all, they have it all, and they have no difficulty in supporting it all. But the fact that Marie Curie clearly did struggle resonates with me: child care for me is often a challenge, and my 15-month-old daughter often comes to work with me. Role models should be real people; if you have a role model who is, or is perceived as, a superwoman, then people think, “Well, that’s not me, I can’t aspire to be that.”
I find her attitude inspirational, too. She was a dedicated and systematic scientist, and spent long, long hours in the lab. As an experimentalist you need that. Some people think that scientists go into a lab, make a discovery, and come out with a Nobel. But success takes years and years of attention to detail, doggedness and stubbornness: and that’s what Marie Curie put in.