
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin - DanielRibeiro
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin
======
rodgerd
"She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree because of her sex;
Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948."

How much talent has been wasted down the centuries due to nonsense like this?

~~~
DanielRibeiro
There many people indignated by this:
[https://twitter.com/marcuschown/status/366132278381903874/ph...](https://twitter.com/marcuschown/status/366132278381903874/photo/1)

~~~
Tichy
Yeah I think comparing her to Galileo, Newton and Einstein is a little over
the top.

That is so typical feminism, trying to frame things as if bad things happened
to her just because she was a woman. If I remember correctly, Einstein was
also not believed by the physics authorities of his time at first - he didn't
even get a job in academics, remember? Galileo was almost burnt on the stake
for his research. Professors trying to steal their students work also happens
all the time. There is a debate that Newton might have stolen calculus from
Leibniz.

Not saying these things are OK, but they didn't happen because Cecilia was a
woman.

If she is not as famous as other physicists, perhaps it is because her work
simply didn't inspire the imagination of people as much. Marie Curie is
famous, and she is a woman.

Also her name might simply be harder to remember than other names. Life is a
bitch. To be honest, my brain just goes "Cecilia prubschichdjadfw-whatever"
when I read her name. That's not fair, but it is not because she is a woman,
it's just that her name is longwinded and foreign.

Maybe Marie Curie is only famous because Kraftwerk made a song about her, and
Einstein is only famous because there is that iconic picture where he sticks
out his tongue. I don't think many people adore physicists because they
understand the actual physics. Everybody can write down e=mc^2 and probably
even know that they wrote down something significant. If you want Cecilia
DJSjug-whatever to be famous, make a better story. Make a song about her,
create an iconic formula, whatever. Don't complain that she is a female
victim. In fact she seems to have been quite successful anyway.

~~~
quinnchr
On the other hand we have tons of data on how women in science are currently
treated, and I don't think it's a huge leap to assume things used to be worse.
So yes I'm pretty sure it's because she was a woman.

"according to the National Science Foundation research, after examining other
factors such as age, experience, and education as the causes of why there is a
gap in success between men and women, they concluded that discrimination is
the only explanation for the poor positions and salaries of women and
minorities."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science#Statistics_abo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science#Statistics_about_women_in_science)

~~~
ismarc
The source that the quote is pulled from (Schiebinger, Londa (2001). Has
Feminism Changed Science?. United States of America: Harvard University Press.
ISBN 0674005449) includes (in the very next paragraph):

"In 1996 salaries for women in professional fields increased to 85–95 percent
of men with similar jobs. Younger women in the United States (childless women
between the ages of 27 and 33) earned nearly the same (98 percent) as men in
their age group."

The quote from the National Science Foundation in the book is unsourced,
however, the only related information from the National Science foundation I
could find was
[http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib99352.htm](http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/issuebrf/sib99352.htm)
which is not necessarily contradictor, but paints an entirely different
picture.

While I disagree with who you are responding to, there has been a massive
improvement in 1 1/2 generations and it removes a significant amount of
credibility to present information in a way to try and say that widespread
systemic discrimination still occurs in areas where it does not.

~~~
quinnchr
The most recent information I can find says that the wage gap for similarly
educated women in the physical sciences is 12%

[http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/08/gender_wage_gap_lower_i...](http://blogs.nature.com/news/2011/08/gender_wage_gap_lower_in_scien.html)

While I agree there have been drastic improvements, I don't think you can say
structural discrimination no longer exists.

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selimthegrim
There is a nice bit about her in Chandrasekhar's APS history interviews

[http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4552.html](http://www.aip.org/history/ohilist/4552.html)

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MaysonL
And she inspired Joan Feynman:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_Feynman)

~~~
throwit1979
This was the more striking part of all this for me. I've read a lot of (Dick)
Feynman biographical material, read his layperson books, his lecture series,
etc.

Until today I had no idea he even had a sister, let alone that she also went
into physics.

~~~
zb
Really? Have you read _What Do_ You _Care What_ Other _People Think?_ Because
she's mentioned fairly prominently in the chapter about how he faced down a
rent-a-mob accusing him of sexism ('Feynman Sexist Pig!').

(To be clear, Feynman actually _was_ sexist, but not in the way that the rent-
a-mob was complaining about.)

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gesman
Wikipedia's creative begging for donations is annoying. IMHO.

