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Alice Lee — news, coverage & facts — IJR

Scientific practice

From about 1895, Lee attended Karl Pearson's statistics lectures at University College London and became interested in his application of statistical methods to evolutionary biology. Under his direction, she studied for an advanced degree. Her research topic was an investigation of variation in cranial capacity in humans and its correlation with intellectual ability. Lee courted controversy with her first published paper on the subject in 1901 A study of the correlation of the human skull. She examined three groups - women students from Bedford College, male faculty at University College, and a collection of distinguished male anatomists. The study demonstrated that there was no correlation between skull size and intelligence. Through a formula Lee calculated the cranial capacity from the anatomical measurements. The individuals in the groups were ranked in order of decreasing skull size, and identified by name. The dissertation was completed in 1899 and the findings caused considerable controversy. It was then an accepted theory in craniology that brain power increased with size, hence skull capacity was a measure of mental ability. As a consequence it was believed that men, who generally had larger heads than women, were mentally superior. Lee's findings shed doubt on that belief. Furthermore, one of the examiners of her dissertation was an anatomist with a low ranking in the skull capacity table of her study. Lee's study drew considerable criticism from her thesis examiners and from eugenicist Francis Galton, who questioned the originality and the scientific quality of her work. It was through Pearson's intervention that Lee was finally awarded a PhD in 1901. The following year Pearson published two papers which answered to the criticism that had been levelled at the findings of Lee's study. As there were no effective challenges, this work was soon accepted.

From 1892, Lee worked in Pearson's biometric laboratory. Initially as volunteer, Lee eventually received a salary of £90 a year and worked three days a week. Her duties included reducing data, computing correlation coefficients, creating histogram bar charts, and calculating new kind of chi-squared distribution statistics. In addition she did "all the hundred and one things that need doing" and acted as a laboratory secretary. Pearson funded her salary though a grant and showed embarrassment that compared to the salary of a female typist or stenographer Lee was not well paid. On the same grant Pearson also hired the sisters Beatrice Mabel Cave-Browne-Cave and Frances Cave-Browne-Cave as part-time computers. Lee held the paid position in the laboratory until 1907 and kept her lectureship at Bredford College until 1916. She carried out laboratory work in her spare time, or on a voluntary basis in Pearson's laboratory.

While working in the laboratory, Lee had started to pursue her own research projects. She published four papers in her own name and contributed to 26 others. Twice she declined to be listed as a co-author of a paper published by Pearson, arguing that she had only done the arithmetic. She was in the process of establishing a reputation as a statistician. For her dissertation she had developed a statistical model that estimated the cranial volume of living humans from external skull measurements. Her research on the statistical analysis of within species variation, a branch of evolutionary biology, continued until 1910 and led her to publish a succession of papers in the Biometrika from 1902 onwards. Lee's work also contributed to the preparation of tabulated functions, which were frequently used by contemporary statisticians and biologists. Her first and second publication on tabulated functions was published in the Reports of the British Science Association in 1896 and 1899. Later works on the subject were published in the Biometrika between 1914 and 1927.