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

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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?

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.

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.

At least Lise Meitner is not forgotten, I currently work in a building on Lise-Meitner Street!

Where is my fucking lady Rosalind Franklin at?

I always take posts like this with a big grain of salt. Yes, women were oppressed and in many places still are, but posts like these tend to stretch and exaggerate the truth because they WANT to find oppression of women. They WANT the fight, and they want the fight to still be here and burning brightly today to justify actions many would find questionable at best.

EDIT: Fun fact for you, in the USA in 1970 8% of stem workers were female. Today, its 27%.

Actually, that Hertha Ayrton quote at the end? About the cats or whatever? That was actually me. I said that.

I’d love to meet whoever made this graphic. Shake his hand. Seems like a good dude.