
Women whom science forgot - jgrahamc
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-33157396
======
hoopd
Let's just pick one of these at random and peak into it, Ida Tack discovering
Technetium.

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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technetium#Unreproducible_results)

------
yes_or_gnome
The Skeptic's Guide podcast has started a segment called 'Forgotten Superheros
of Science'. The first episode with the segment is #496
([http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu//496](http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu//496)),
the 'superheros' are often female. There's a couple reasons for that, the
minor reason being the show's only female host, Rebecca Watson, left the show
at the end of last year. But, show host Steven Novella has repeated this same
narrative (as is made in the article) over the years.

They have covered a few of the women mentioned in this article.

Rosalind Franklin:
[http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu//498](http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu//498)

Lise Meitner and ;Ida Tacke:
[http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu//510](http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu//510)

Chien-Shiung Hu:
[http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu//518](http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu//518)

Full Archive:
[http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu](http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu)

I apologize for the plug, but it feels relevant.

~~~
pimlottc
A very brief humorous version of Rosalind Franklin's story on "Hark! A
Vagrant":
[http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=240](http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=240)

------
facepalm
I think those articles are silly. If you ask random people on the street, they
usually won't be able to name a lot of scientists. So male and female
scientists tend to be forgotten. Also, I'm sure Marie Curie would also be in
the list of the unforgotten ones - the research they did was a Google
search???

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?

~~~
vezzy-fnord
I have to agree. All the talk about STEM eating the world in mind, the fact
remains that the vast majority of scientists, no matter how well
distinguished, are not celebrities.

------
danso
In terms of women and computer science, I've been curious if anyone had
followed up on Fran Allen's (the first woman recipient of the Turing Award)
claims in "Coders at Work" that she personally knew of women colleagues whose
work was outright stolen:

[http://www.codersatwork.com/fran-
allen.html](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.

~~~
jperras
> In terms of women and computer science, I've been curious if anyone had
> followed up on Fran Allen's (the first woman recipient of the Turing Award)
> claims in "Coders at Work" that she personally knew of women colleagues
> whose work was outright stolen

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.

~~~
danso
I wasn't accusing her of lying. I was asking if there was any follow up and/or
consequences. She gives more than enough detail to identify the perpetrator,
and so has this issue been openly confronted (it might have and I'm just not
up to speed) and resolved? Has it been ignored? Or has it just not been
publicized enough?

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.

------
arcanus
I'm saddened to see no mention here of Vera Rubin:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_Rubin)

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.

~~~
hoopd
You're saddened? Why? As you say Rubin gets appropriate credit for her work
within her field. Plus she doesn't even believe in Dark Matter, she made a
very important contribution but now she's working on a competing theory that
few care about.

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...](http://discovermagazine.com/2009/jan/30-the-father-of-dark-matter-
still-gets-no-respect)

------
eveningcoffee
"The Nobel laureate Sir Tim Hunt was heavily criticised for his disparaging
remarks about women in science last week, which for some raised the issue of
where women stood in the scientific community."

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".

------
astazangasta
Let's add Grace Hopper, who created the first compiler and the first human-
readable programming language (COBOL). Doesn't get more huge than that.

~~~
hga
Let's not get carried away, Autocodes with compilers for the Mark 1 well
precede her FLOW-MATIC for the UNIVAC I, which precedes COBOL.

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.

