My former best friend one day out of the blue told me he thought that women are on average smarter than men but are not capable of rising to the very top level of human intellect. His “proof” of this was the fact that nearly all major scientific discoveries have been made by men. Needless to say, he thought of himself as being at the highest level of human intellect - despite having made no major scientific discoveries himself (or even minor ones for that matter). This was the beginning of the end of our friendship, and I’m only embarrassed that it wasn’t instantly the end of our friendship.
Unlike your ex-friend, I have reached the pinnacle of human intelligence because I have made one minor scientific discovery. That discovery being how cute my cat is. He’s such a cute little guy, he doesn’t even know how small and precious he is.
At least Lise Meitner is not forgotten, I currently work in a building on Lise-Meitner Street!
Missing the mention of Einstein’s first wife?
We should always add a mental asterisk to the names of male researchers who discovered things while women were oppressed.
That said, this meme is playing loose and fast with the specifics, which undermines that important message.
Just picking the first one:
Payne’s work was her Ph.D. thesis and Russell did not tell her not to publish it, her advisor did. The advisor told her not to rock the boat in her thesis. This is good advice that even Einstein was given. Payne, badass, declined.
When Russell later reproduced her research, he cited her thesis as the “most important research” he’d seen on the subject.
The real snub with Payne is that her title was “Technical Advisor” for 20 years despite being well regarded as a full time professor. It wasn’t until the 50’s she was recognized as a professor, when she was also made chair of the department.
Source: https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosmic-horizons-book/cecilia-payne-profile
They’re all like that. For some reason trying to make the men out as bad people… When nothing really happened. Wish people could try to appreciate women’s contributions without trying to diminish men’s contributions or create a false narrative.
Everything has to be a Hollywood production. It’s brainrot.
And of course Headie Lamar gets snubbed with this graphic… The woman who is the reason most of us are online, and able to listen to our podcasts
I believe her contributions are farily well known nowadays. The idea was probably to highlight those that most people never heard of.
Considering how this graph… Hmm… Shall we say… Takes a number of creative liberties with actual history surrounding these great women, doesn’t this graph undermine its own message?
In what ways?
I don’t know the context, but it sounds like the person your responding to says the achievements from these women are exaggerated in the meme, and by lying about the value of their contributions you’re discrediting the “women in STEM” movement
This comment discusses the “exaggerations” in more detail: https://lemmy.ml/comment/13915583
I could take a gander as well, but they don’t actually say anything substantive so I guess we’ll never know.
When I took some astronomy classes in the early 2000s, Jocelyn Bell was absolutely credited. In her own words:
It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the Nobel Prize awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. There are several comments that I would like to make on this: First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it - after all, I am in good company, am I not!
That said, yeah, I think she absolutely should have been awarded the Nobel prize. But while she did not, she has the admiration — rightly so — of many a budding astronomer.
Shout out to the bad bitch Margaret Hamilton who was a coder for the Apollo 11 mission. She was a huge inspiration to me as a kid and they made a Lego set that included her.
See also Rosalind Franklin who first discovered DNA’s double helix structure (three men later received the Nobel Prize for this finding).
And more examples here.
Franklin might have won the prize, had she not died 4 years before the prize was awarded. Rules forbid the Nobel being awarded to the deceased.
True. But it’s still three men named in the list of Nobel Prize winners, when a woman first made the actual discoveries. So even if there was no foulplay, it’s important to shine a light on women like Franklin.
Fuck Watson and Crick, all my homies hate Watson and Crick
Where is my fucking lady Rosalind Franklin at?
TBF the male researchers involved in Franklin’s case are/were straight-up assholes across the board, not just sexist appropriators.
First thing I thought too!!
Lise Meitner went on to be forgotten? In my city, a big street bears her name, including the tram station there. Fittingly, it’s the tram to the University that stops there. Essentially, her name is hammered into all students’ heads here.
Not to mention she’s been immortalized as Meitnerium
My reaction exactly. I studied there as well. Lise Meitner may be underappreciated but at least someone made sure she’s not forgotten.
Also she herself said that Otto Hahn deserved the Nobel prize. She and Otto Frisch (far kess known than she is!) did the theoretical work regarding the physics behind it.
But Pauli got the physics prize that year, and he sure deserves it. Maybe one of the later prices could have been awarded to her.
Otto Frisch is better known these days because he went on to work on the Manhatten Project. He appeared as a character in Oppenheimer.
Right? In germany there is a lot named after her. e.g. The Institute for Nuclear Research in Berlin is the “Hahn-Meitner-Institut” (after her and Otto Hahn). There are severals Schools and streets named after her all over the country.
Agree. There’s a street, a monument, a research facility and two schools with her name in a 10km radius of me.
She also has an element named after her
Nowadays the men have learned to be more subtle and would say “and thanks to Lise for arranging the socials”.
I wamted to post Ada Lovelace and Maria Curie, but then I read image.
Marie Skłodowska Curie
For our polish friends
Some of the best evidence we discovered for tectonic plates was discovered by a woman. Marie Tharp discovered the Mid-Atlantic ridge and had her work stolen by her colleague.
Don’t forget Mary Anning!
Anning searched for fossils in the area’s Blue Lias and Charmouth Mudstone cliffs, particularly during the winter months when landslides exposed new fossils that had to be collected quickly before they were lost to the sea. Her discoveries included the first correctly identified ichthyosaur skeleton when she was twelve years old; the first two nearly complete plesiosaur skeletons; the first pterosaur skeleton located outside Germany; and fish fossils. Her observations played a key role in the discovery that coprolites, known as bezoar stones at the time, were fossilised faeces, and she also discovered that belemnite fossils contained fossilised ink sacs like those of modern cephalopods.
Anning struggled financially for much of her life. As a woman, she was not eligible to join the Geological Society of London, and she did not always receive full credit for her scientific contributions. However, her friend, geologist Henry De la Beche, who painted Duria Antiquior, the first widely circulated pictorial representation of a scene from prehistoric life derived from fossil reconstructions, based it largely on fossils Anning had found and sold prints of it for her benefit.
