Women in Science

• Women represent only about a fifth of senior authors in all published research.
• A study, published in the journal PLOS One in 2018, assessed 293,557 research articles from 54 journals and found that only 29.8% of all research authors were women.
• Another study by the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) noted that women inventors account for just under 13% of patent applications globally.
• In India, out of the 560 awardees of Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, only 18 recipients have been women. The prize is one of the highest multidisciplinary science awards in India.

Raman Effect

• The Raman Effect is a phenomenon in spectroscopy discovered by the eminent physicist Sir Chandrasekhara Venkata Raman in 1928.
• In 1930, he got a Nobel Prize for this remarkable discovery and this was the first Nobel Prize for India in the field of Science.
• The Raman Effect is a change in the wavelength of light that occurs when a light beam is deflected by molecules. When a beam of light traverses a dust-free, transparent sample of a chemical compound, a small fraction of the light emerges in directions other than that of the incident (incoming) beam. Most of this scattered light is of unchanged wavelength. A small part, however, has wavelengths different from that of the incident light; its presence is a result of the Raman Effect.