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“I am happy also that there are more women in science,” she said, recalling having to fight constantly for her own recognition when she was a young woman pursuing a career in physics. “When you know in your heart that you are right, you have to stand up. That’s what I tell my daughter.”

Photo by Darren Brown/National Post

Hruska’s story begins in Czechoslovakia, where she grew up, lived through the Second World War, and went to university, ultimately earning a doctorate in physics in the then-Soviet bloc country.

Hruska’s university class featured five girls, two boys. Her graduate studies were supervised by a female professor. Though Hruska married and had a daughter, families couldn’t really live on a single income, she said, so she worked. Hruska recalled that at one point she was living with her in-laws and using a flashlight to study physics under her daughter’s crib.

She took night shifts at a Prague observatory to help financially support the family. One night in October 1957, she became the first person in her country to know that the world’s first artificial satellite, the Soviet Sputnik, had been launched into orbit.

But life brought her away from Eastern Europe. In 1967, the young family moved to Vancouver on student visas for the University of British Columbia, intending to return to Czechoslovakia. Soviets invaded their country in 1968, forcing a difficult decision about whether to return or start a new life in Canada.

I found it strange that so many women were home

They chose the latter, making a pit stop in Colorado before settling in Ottawa in 1971, after Hruska’s husband got a job at the National Research Council. It was “culture shock,” she said, with a big difference between reality and the anti-Western propaganda shown by the Soviet Union. As she sought work and got up to speed with her English, Hruska noticed, too, that the workforce in Canada was more male-dominated.