Women whom science forgot
bbc.com
bbc.com
She was one woman on a team with two men who did an unreproducible experiment that "discovered" Technetium[0]. To this day the experiment hasn't been reproduced. Maybe they did find it, but if nobody else could make their experiment work that's just how it goes. Science can't start giving credit to people for unreproducible experiments just because they're women.
> It was she who managed to find two new elements, rhenium and masurium, that Dmitri Mendeleev had predicted would form part of the periodic table.
She was on a team! The author is doing to Tack's male teammates the exact thing he claims to believe is wrong, which is to leave people out because of their sex.
The fact that she was on a team with two men, and that a male was the top author on their paper makes sexism very unlikely. If her co-authors got credit and she didn't that would be one thing, but none of them got credit.
The whole article is filled with women who did things that wouldn't have made them famous if they were men. The cases that may have merit, and I'm sure there are some, are more difficult to take seriously because the level of bias of the author.
[0] -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium#Unreproducible_resu...
They have covered a few of the women mentioned in this article.
Rosalind Franklin: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu//498
Lise Meitner and ;Ida Tacke: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu//510
Chien-Shiung Hu: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu//518
Full Archive: http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu
I apologize for the plug, but it feels relevant.
Einstein is famous not only for his physics, but also because of the circumstances, overthrowing the whole established world of physics, all the while not even getting tenure in academia but working in the patent office instead.
Darwin, Newton - sorry, most female scientists are not Darwins or Newtons, and neither are most male scientists.
And a lot of the supposedly forgotten women actually received Nobel prices, had chemical elements named after them, became first female professors in their subject and what not.
Edit: I was too lazy this time, but last time that sort of meme spread through the networks I made the effort to go to Wikipedia. I think I remember Lise Meitner - she is the one who has a chemical element named after her. Hardly "forgotten", only few people get that honor. Apparently the decision was made to leave her out of the Nobel prize to protect her against the Nazis. A decision that led to much debate over the years - but hardly the "she was forgotten and deprived of her achievements because she was a woman" that this feminist narrative wants to make out of it. If you read her Wikipedia page, she received all sorts of honors (I couldn't find the reference to the Nobel/Nazi issue, but I only skimmed it right now).
Maybe Rosalind Franklin wasn't included in the Nobel prize because only living people get the Nobel?
Like many other people including Robert Oppenheimer, Rosalind Franklin died before she might have gotten a Nobel. Only 5-6 years after the research, 4 years before the prize was given for it; and looking at the details, I think this is particularly silly because by definition she had all the data and nonetheless failed to deduce the structure ... and she had a lot of company, including the 20th Century's preeminent chemist, Linus Pauling, who proposed a bizarre 3 strand structure.
The case of Lise Meitner is particularly silly, because she would get at best equal billing with her nephew Otto Frisch; they were together in Sweden on Christmas vacation when Meitner's radiochemistry colleague Otto Hahn sent the startling data to her first, even before any of the physicists in his (Nazi) German chemistry institute (a truly prejudicial action indeed!).
Together they figured out the likely mechanism and energetics (how the electrostatic force of all those protons could overpower the strong nuclear force), and Frisch was then was able to do some confirming experiments when he got back to Bohr's lab in Denmark (Meitner was not in a position to do that, her Austrian citizenship allowed her to stay in Germany until the Anschluss 1938, by which time there weren't many physics positions left in the world and she had to settle for a poor one in Sweden).
And leaving both these Jewish physicists out of the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry also protected Otto Hahn; Meitner was in potential danger in neutral Sweden, Frisch not so much having gone to work in the US on the Manhattan project.
I don't know how many physicists have won Nobel Chemistry prizes for physics, and I suspect Hahn's radiochemisty work was significantly more notable than Meitner and Frisch's. Per Rhodes in The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Hahn was manipulating just a few thousand atoms at a time in his work (!!!), and was of course willing to believe his data, no matter how far out from what everyone believe about the nucleus. Whereas Meitner and Frisch's greatest advantage was being the first physicists to get Hahn's data; but, that said, they did make sense of it, per Rhodes while on a walk out in the snow (Meitner was pretty amazing in having all the needed physical data in her head, then again there's a reason we have so much respect for the physicists of the first half of the 20th Century :-).
http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-allen.html
Peter Seibel. Coders at Work: Reflections of the Craft of Programming (Kindle Locations 6410-6419). Kindle Edition.
Seibel: You have been the first woman in many categories-first Turing Award winner, first IBM Fellow. Do you feel like there were women before you who were overlooked?
Allen: Oh, yes, absolutely. Seibel: So when you won the Turing, did you think to yourself, "Gee, there's another woman who should have won this a long time ago?"
Allen: Well, the very first thing I thought about was how wonderful it was. And then I started to think about all the many other women who were never recognized at all for their work. In many cases, their work was stolen. I thought about the women who had done some very amazing things that have not been recognized, even by their peers. When I approach them and say, "You need to join some professional organizations-I'll write some recommendations for you," they kind of shy away from that.
Seibel: So you think that part of the problem is they don't get recognized because they're not putting themselves in a place to be recognized as easily.
Allen: Right.
Seibel: Are there any particular folks that you would like to name-to give a little recognition now? Allen: Well, there's Edith Schonberg, who is a great computer scientist. In terms of technical work, it's just one first after another on some of her papers. She's had work stolen-absolutely brutally stolen. She wrote a paper on debugging of parallel code, which is a very hard problem. It was not accepted at a conference and somebody who had been on the program committee made three papers out of it. That kind of thing. It happens in our field and we don't have good ways of dealing with it.
Seibel: And it happens more to women?
Allen: Yes, I think it does. They were often viewed as not going to put up a fight-that they were more isolated and don't have the advocates who will deal with a famous thief. He was a famous thief, known but nobody dared touch it. And there are plenty of others way back from the Stretch days. There was a woman who essentially was the inventor of multiprogramming and credit was taken by somebody who eventually became a Turing Award winner.
What motivation would she have to lie about such a thing? Let's just assume that an award-winning brilliant computer scientist is telling the truth about something, especially when she stands to gain nothing and has the chance to lose quite a bit.
Related to that question, and just as important, is the possibility that Allen is not lying -- but is telling what she knows and is pretty sure of (I suspect she doesn't trade on flimsy rumors)...but that doesn't mean that at the time of the interview, she knew everything about what went on. Stealing-of-credit is frequently very messy in the interpretation. And if the accused was publicly called out to defend himself, more facts may have come to light that affirm or contradict the accuser.
Not convinced that this is not just a case of bad framing.
That said, I think Allen insinuates and believes that the current gender dynamic makes it harder for affected women to push back (which of course is another unquantifiable thing),
The same applies to promotions. For every story of a woman who was not promoted in IT, there are probably 20 untold stories of men who were not promoted in IT. Simply because much more men than women work in IT, and only few can be promoted.
I just question the whole approach of arguing with anecdotes.
I think it would be better to back such things up with research, rather than enforce stereotypes.
I've heard several male scientists in cosmology suggest that Rubin either discovered or was instrumental in the discovery of dark matter.
This was a profound and fascinating experimental result: galaxies contain much more mass than can be accounted for by observable matter. The implication is that the observable (baryonic) matter in the universe is only a small fraction of the actual mass content. This is remains an unsolved problem in cosmology.
I know that even today the LHC is running at higher energies in part due to an is interested in explaining dark matter through the generation of WIMPs and other massive particles. So this remains a very interesting question in physics.
Despite her thought providing result, she is not a well known scientist.
Nobody knows who Kent Ford is, he co-authored Rubin's big paper.
What about Jan Oort? He came up with the idea of Dark Matter in the 1930's and some say found the first evidence for it.
What about Fritz Zwicky? Some say he's the one who found the first evidence and is the one really being left out of history.[0]
We're being taught to feel bad for women in science in situations where we don't feel bad for men. Science is full of forgotten men who made massive contributions to the world, this is about picking the woman and figuring out how to mythologize her.
[0] - http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/30-the-father-of-dark-m...
I think that this is a welcomed article but this kind of defamation should stop. When bunch of people misinterpret and overreact does not mean that something is actually truth.
Anyway, these kind of articles (without quoted part) are a must read list for women who think that "only men have made big discoveries".
A lot of this depended on computer access, this is back in the days before core memory, when a several thousand vacuum tubes were used for the CPU, and before core memory was generally available. The Mark 1 initially had 5120 bits of main memory using CRTs, the UNIVAC I used mercury delay lines, 1,000 words of 12 characters.