high time we had a gender thread

[zn]

https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/gk-current-affairs/story/7-women-scientists-whose-discoveries-were-credited-to-men-1911896-2022-02-11

Day of Women and Girls in Science: 7 women scientists whose discoveries were credited to men
On the Day of Women and Girls in Science, here are 7 women scientists whose discoveries were credited to men.

History and science books are littered with mentions of ‘great’ men, many of whom were of course not that great. Incredible women who have created history (and science) have often been simply written out, many a time because some man was there to take the credit for her work.

And there are many such cases and these are only the ones that we know of and not completely lost to time which show that there have been ground-breaking discoveries and inventions made by women.

And this is all the more significant because are talking about periods of history where women definitely didn’t have equal education, forget about equal opportunities, especially in the field of science.

But there were many who were walking outside the boundaries drawn for them in their times and sadly lost out visibility through time because of men who not only took credit for their work casually but through mentions in journals, winning major awards, earning millions and being iconised in history.

All the while, the names of many women scientists and researchers have been either entirely wiped out from history or delegated to a footnote both in research papers and in the lens of history itself.

As we celebrate the Day of Women and Girls in Science, we are fully aware that even today, we haven’t reached a space where women in STEM get equal opportunities and equal pay for their work.

Here are 7 women scientists whose discoveries were credited to men:

1. Rosalind Franklin: The Double Helix

Cambridge University scientists James D Watson and Francis HC Crick are credited for discovering the double helix strand structure of the DNA which pushed forward our understanding of the human DNA to a great extent.

However, it was British chemist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin who produced the one ground-breaking image ‘Photo 51’ while she was engaged in this research at Kings’s College, London, in 1951 when she produced a ground-breaking image.

One of her colleagues showed the image to the male scientist duo without telling Franklin. It took Franklin a year more to fully interpret and describe the double helix structure.

Two years later, Watson and Crick published their findings in 1953. Franklin was published in the same journal but in later pages which gave people the idea that her work supported that of the other two.

A year later, Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer and four years later, Watson and Crick picked up the Nobel Prize in 1958 for the double helix discovery.

Apart from this work, she unravelled the structure and porosity of coal for her PhD thesis, which led the British to develop better gas masks during WWII.

Also, her later work on RNA and viruses supported Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Aaron Klug’s work of creating 3D images of viruses.

2. Eunice Foote: The greenhouse effect

British scientist John Tyndall is most often credited for discovering the greenhouse effect — the gradual warming of Earth’s atmosphere which is a foundational discovery in the field of climate science.

However, it was Eunice Foote, a pioneering American scientist and a women’s rights activists who first theorised and demonstrated the greenhouse effect.

She conducted a series of experiments in the 1950s where filled glass cylinders with different gases and kept them in the sun to measure how the temperature changes differed.

Eunice Foote found that the sun’s rays were warmer when passing through moist air rather than dry, and warmest when passing through carbon dioxide than any other gas.

She did publish her findings in the American Journal of Science in 1857 but she was not even allowed to present her research at a scientific conference and had to ask a male colleague to do it.

Though her work was published three years before Tyndall, it is the male scientist that most people remember for discovering the greenhouse effect.

3. Lise Meitner: Nuclear Fission

Nuclear fission — the ability to split atoms — was a ground-breaking development that led to the atomic bomb and nuclear reactors.

It was legendary physicist Max Plank’s students, Austrian and Swedish physicist Lise Meitner who suggested the idea of bombarding uranium atoms with neutrons in order to learn more about uranium decay to her colleagues Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman.

Meitner was also the first German woman who had a professorship at a German university. Nevertheless, she was Jewish and living in Berlin in 1938. To escape the Nazis, she had to leave her research behind and escape to Stockholm. Her colleagues continued the research and got some unexpected results.

Lise Meitner then partnered with Otto Frisch, an Austrian-born British physicist who was in Sweden at the time. Together, they named what Hanh and Strassman has discovered — fission.

In 1945, Hahn received the Nobel Prize for the heavy nuclei fission discovery and Meitner was not even mentioned. She went on to receive 49 Nobel Prize nominations for Physics and Chemistry but never won.

In 1966, the US awarded her the Enrico Fermi Award alongside Hahn and Strassman for her contributions to nuclear fission. She died two years later.

4. Hedy Lamarr: Wireless communication

Austrian-born Hollywood actor Hedy Lamarr is the brain behind wireless communication.

The silver screen star in the Golden Age of Hollywood had worked closely with George Antheil during WWII to discover ‘frequency hopping’ so that they could prevent the bugging of military radios. They created a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes.

The US Navy ignored her patent and later used her work to develop several new technologies and weapons systems. He work is the basis for Wi-Fi, CDMA, and Bluetooth technology.

Later on, her patent was rediscovered by a researchers and Lamarr finally won the Electronic Frontier Foundation Award. Shortly after, she died in 2000.

5. Lady Ada Lovelace: Computer programming

Lord Byron’s daughter, Lady Ada Lovelace wrote the instructions for the world’s first ever computer programme while collaborating with mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage in 1843 in the creation of the analytical engine — a precursor to the computer.

Her extensive notes decided how Babbage’s machine could be fed data in order to solve complicated math problems or even compose music.

But since it was Babbage who created the actual engine, Ada Lovelace’s contributions are often obscured by debate.

6. Alice Ball: Leprosy cure

Hansen’s disease or leprosy, a stigmatised bacterial infection, was quite a danger to the healthcare system since its first mention in an Egyptian papyrus from around 1550 BC.

Contagious patients were usually isolated and left to die. But 23-year-old chemist Alice Ball was trying to find a cure while working at the Kalihi hospital in Hawaii.

She was trying to figure out how to inject chaulmoogra oil directly into the bloodstream since it didn’t mix with blood. Oil from the chaulmoogra tree was used in Chinese and Indian medicine and was said to alleviate symptoms.

In 1916, Ball, the first woman and the first black Chemistry professor at the University of Hawaii, figured out how to turn the oil into fatty acids and ethyl esters that would make the medicine injectable.

However, just months later, she died from a lab accident complications. Arthur Dean, teh head of her department, took over her study, and published a paper on the ‘Dean’s Method’.

Later, it was changed to ‘Ball’s Method’ after a colleague of hers spoke up and helped change the name.

7. Candace Pert: Neuroscience findings

While she was just a graduate student, Candace Pert discovered the receptor that allows opiates to lock into the human brain. This was a ground-breaking discovery in the field of neuroscience.

However, it was her professor, Dr Solomon Snyder who walked away with an award for it. When Pert wrote to him in protests, he responded with, “That’s how the game is played.”

[zn]

https://t.co/WHedWyZcOG
Greg Abbott: Lets torture a marginalized minority of civilians and make political hay out of it.

— Fred Spenger (@beowulfred) March 12, 2022

[zn]

[zn]

[zn]

[Zooey]

[joemad]

 

 

[zn]

[zn]

Women Work Less Than Men — And Other Myths About the Gender Pay Gap

There’s a lot more to the pay gap than you might think

https://keralataylor.medium.com/three-myths-about-the-gender-pay-gap-f8f5e89dc023

One day, back in 2009, I discovered that I was making less money than the man sitting next to me.

This man was my co-founder; we had been working side by side for over seven years. When we went to our first conference, we had stayed in a youth hostel together, where I spent four consecutive nights in a bunk room with six snoring men.

We had hauled boxes of magazines to conference centers by foot — sometimes across dirt fields and train tracks. We had flown to DC together on Valentine’s Day to pitch our magazine to executives in gleaming shoes. We even shared a king-sized bed in a boutique hotel because these same executives had assumed, erroneously, that we were a couple.

We both had bachelor degrees from the same Ivy League college, had both poured our blood, sweat, and tears into the venture. And yet, somewhere along the way, my co-founder made a secret, unilateral decision to pay himself an annual salary that was $10,000 more than mine.

In retrospect, it’s glaringly obvious that I should have been paying closer attention to the financials. But he handled the operations and I handled all things editorial. It’s true I had never entirely trusted him. I just so desperately wanted to.

I’m certainly not the first woman to find out that I’m making less money than the man sitting next to me, and unfortunately I won’t be the last. Stories like these, famously highlighted by the U.S. women’s soccer team and the equal pay settlement they reached this past February, are at the core of most conversations about the gender pay gap.

This type of gap, if it’s uncovered at all, is easy to understand. When an equally (or more) qualified woman makes less money doing an equivalent job as the man sitting next to her, an injustice has clearly taken place.

But while the factors driving the gender pay gap include these blatant disparities, they have far more layers and nuances that are often left out of the conversation. The income I’ve lost out on goes way beyond a $10,000 discrepancy I uncovered at age 28.

Here’s what else has been at play:

I was socialized from a young age to be a “helper” and “helper jobs,” typically dominated by females, offer lower pay than the Big Important Jobs that the patriarchy has deemed more economically valuable.
I’ve taken on a disproportionate share of the unpaid labor at home, which limits my ability to benefit from a working culture that rewards butts in seats.
Regardless of my efficiency or the results I produce, I am perceived as less committed, less ambitious, or having less potential — particularly since having children.
There are some men, I’ve discovered through firsthand experience, who get very angry at any mention of the gender pay gap. They rant and rage all over the Internet, often in all caps. They are vehement that the gender pay gap, like most everything else women “whine” about, is something we invented because we so desperately aspire to victimhood.

Women work less than men, they insist. We have a “natural” inclination for lower-paying industries with less economic worth, and we opt for less demanding roles because our God-given maternal instincts make us yearn to spend more time taking care of our partners and children. Therefore, it only stands to reason that we should be paid less.

Let’s unpack these myths one by one:

Myth: Women choose jobs in lower-paying fields that are less economically valuable.
I was raised by progressive parents. My mother, like most mothers I knew, worked outside the home, and my father cooked most of our meals. But still, I was socialized to nurture at a young age. I was given dolls and tea sets, played “house” with my friends, and often dabbled in the kitchen.

I also had a mind for numbers. In middle school, I skipped seventh-grade math; in high school, my trigonometry teacher proclaimed me a “math genius.” While “genius” was most definitely an overstatement, I did go on to score a five on my AP Calculus exam.

But I never, not once, considered a career that involved math. I believed I was only good at math because I worked hard in it, not because I had any natural proclivity. Math teachers might be women, but mathematicians, as far as I knew, were men.

I didn’t just “choose” a career in the nonprofit industry because I wanted to help people. I’d been primed to want to help people. It’s the same reason women “choose” careers in nursing, caregiving, and teaching.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with opting for a career in these fields. They are incredibly demanding — and absolutely essential to our economy, as Covid so starkly revealed. Yet they are still consistently devalued, and sometimes openly mocked. They are not “serious fields.”

Social perceptions around “men’s work” and “women’s work” are far more powerful than we tend to acknowledge. The female software developer may be making less money than the male software developer sitting next to her, but how many females never become software developers at all?

To be clear, narrowing the pay gap is not just about inspiring women to be scientists or software developers. It’s also about inspiring men to be nurses and teachers. And it’s about recognizing the economic and social worth of our nation’s caregivers and helpers, then paying them accordingly.

Myth: Women work less than men.
My partner was a stay-at-home dad for the first 18 months of our daughter’s life. It was a decision made out of of financial necessity, but I was also proud of us for challenging traditional gender norms.

Yet neither of us realized how much continual brute force it would take to swim against the currents of socialization. When baby #2 came along and he went back to school, I unwittingly became the default parent, taking on the majority of daycare drop-offs and school pick-ups, the brunt of the scheduling and appointment making, the lion’s share of school volunteer work and after-school activity coordination, and a higher percentage of household chores. This, in addition to being the sole income earner for my family.

My story may be unique, but my disproportionate share of invisible, emotional, and household labor is not.

According to the pay gap deniers, men work more than women and should therefore be paid more. On the surface, self-reported data collected by the Department of Labor seems to support this claim. Women do, on average, work 42 fewer minutes a day than men — if by “work,” you mean paid labor.

But that’s a big if.

Study after study shows that working women still take on far more unpaid labor in the home — in the United States, over four hours a day, compared to men’s 2.5.

Not only is unpaid labor, well… unpaid, it is not perceived by society as particularly worthy or important. “What is the economic value,” one commenter asked me, “of changing a diaper?”

Despite the fact that children are the most important resource for a country’s future economic growth, and despite the fact that caregiving comprises the backbone of our economy, all genders are still socialized to see childrearing and household management as work that happens “outside” the male-driven economic engine of business. And it is largely still “women’s work,” whether or not a woman also works outside the home.

Men often either flat-out deny this imbalance — hence, the term “invisible labor” — or justify it by asserting that their female partners have more flexible or less demanding jobs. A fascinating study outlined in All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership revealed that male doctors with female partners who were lawyers claimed their partners’ jobs were more flexible, while male lawyers with female partners who were doctors made the same claim.

Men often pitch in, of course — they too change diapers, cook dinner, and wear Ergos. But gender disparities in household labor are still stark, and even more stark in households with children. Men who work 42 minutes longer at their paying jobs than their female counterparts are still enjoying, on average 45 more minutes a day of leisure — and a heftier paycheck.

Myth: Women choose less demanding roles because they want to spend more time with their families.
As I entered my fourth decade of life, I was making moves in my career. I’d gotten a sizable raise and promotion at the end of my first year at a national nonprofit, and our executive team had nominated me as one of the country’s 50 emerging nonprofit leaders.

Then I had a baby.

I took off 10 weeks, only partially paid through disability insurance. After returning to work full-time, I left the house at 7 a.m. every morning and returned to my infant at 6 p.m. every evening. I cobbled together a few hours of sleep every night, then woke up to do it again.

At work, there was no more talk of promotions or raises. When my partner and I decided to move across the country, my request to work remotely was denied. Not long after, my former coworker, who had reported to me, told me he was thinking of moving across the country, too. “Do you think they’ll let me work remotely?” he wanted to know.

I told him probably not, but good luck.

Turns out, he didn’t need my good luck wishes. His request was not only approved, but shortly thereafter he became the director of my former department.

Women, and particularly working mothers, are not only penalized in their day jobs for their unpaid morning, afternoon, and evening shifts, but also for a persistent perception that they are less committed to their jobs, even if the evidence points to the contrary.

We are simply not “VP material” because our children cannot transport themselves home from daycare, and the daycare closes promptly at 5:30 p.m. Our children are also sometimes sick, and they cannot stay home unsupervised.

Who cares that we’re miraculously efficient? Who cares that we produce results? Who cares that we’re often the ones who are most excited to return to work on Monday morning after a chaotic weekend of errands, runny noses, and cold birthday party pizza?

The butts that are in the seats the longest are the butts that get rewarded, and unfortunately, our mommy butts often have to be in multiple places at once.

Closing the gender pay gap is partially about ensuring that women make as much as the equally (or less) qualified men sitting next to them. But it’s also about challenging a working culture that rewards long hours above all else. It’s about balancing gender ratios and pay scales across all industries. It’s about balancing paid and unpaid labor across all genders.

At the worker-owned co-op where I’m now employed, my fellow co-owners and I are tackling and untangling these knotty issues, one by one. Maybe we can’t solve them for everyone, but we can at least start solving them for 15 people, and we can offer a blueprint to others for doing the same.

In the meantime, I’ll happily accept the money I make when gender gap deniers hate-read my stories. I consider it back pay for the approximately $240,000 I’ve lost out on over the course of my own 20-year career.

[zn]

I got one of the first lines of credit given a woman, in 1970. It was 23 years before we ceased to be property. Until 1993, it was legal for a man to rape his wife. Her body was his, not hers. Not so long ago. We're living in the backlash. Fight like crazy, kids. It's fragile. https://t.co/Dw9VdOQ73B

— Gail McGowan Mellor (@authorpendragon) June 8, 2022

[zn]

So this went off! Some are asking for the details. It happened in Brazil. The attacker was allegedly holding a knife. The high vis guy ripping the sign was allegedly doing that to use as a defensive weapon. Here’s an article about it anyways. https://t.co/B9uri7RLn7

— Evelyn Rae (@_evelynrae) June 9, 2022

[zn]

A patient’s husband told her she’s not allowed to get a mammogram (essentially because he wouldn’t want her to get a mastectomy if needed) and I don’t think I’ve been that mad before, or talked that forcefully to a patient’s family member.

— Cat Doc (@CatDocMD) June 17, 2022

[zn]

C.S. Friedman

Do people in the South say “Now go on woman, get me my dinner”?

Not twice 🙂

[zn]

[zn]

[zn]

In America, women are now breeding stock. Apparently. https://t.co/vd3rDz1kdN

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) July 10, 2022

[zn]

West Virginia Senator Robert Karnes says child rape victims “romanticize” relationships with their rapists…pic.twitter.com/vtsObC0mFK

— Rex Chapman🏇🏼 (@RexChapman) August 1, 2022

[zn]

Amy Gaeta@GaetaAmy

I can’t stop thinking about how the divorce rate for men leaving their really sick wives is so high that nurses are taught to warn women patients when they get diagnosed with a serious illness

.

The men who leave their spouses when they have a life-threatening illness

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/30/the-men-who-give-up-on-their-spouses-when-they-have-cancer

.

Why Men Leave Their Dying Wives – Catholic Heral

• https://catholicherald.co.uk/ch/why-men-leave-their-dying-wives/

.

Separation And Divorce Far More Common When The Wife Is The Patient

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110105401.htm

.

Men Are Far More Likely to Abandon a Seriously Ill Spouse

https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/men-are-far-more-likely-to-abandon-a-seriously-ill-spouse

.

Why Men Leave When Cancer Arrives – Newsweek

https://www.newsweek.com/why-men-leave-when-cancer-arrives-76637

.

 why men leave ill partners

Men are seven times more likely than women to leave a seriously ill partner

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/until-her-sickness-do-us-part-why-men-leave-ill-partners-f6r3mwh2twb

[zn]

Okie Space Queen@OkieSpaceQueen

Today a man asked me how little boys are supposed to feel when they find out Artemis will have a female crew. I asked him how he thought little girls felt when John Glenn got in front of Congress and said women shouldn’t be allowed to be astronauts.

[zn]

Outspoken@Out5p0ken

A Black child who was raped at 15 and murdered her rapist has been ordered to pay his family $150,000 in restitution. Nice going, Iowa.

.

HuffPost@HuffPost

The fundraising appeal for 17-year-old Pieper Lewis surpassed the $150,000 she was ordered to pay the family of her accused rapist.

[zn]

Mohamad Safa@mhdksafa

In Iran if a 12-year-old girl is raped and impregnated by her father, she must carry the baby to term, or be thrown in prison for life. Wait, sorry, no. That’s Alabama.

[zn]

…

Listen up, ladies. pic.twitter.com/YZAiNGSPF6

— GodHatesUs (@Lillithshadows) September 30, 2022

[zn]

Mohamad Safa@mhdksafa

In 1975, women of Iceland went on strike for equal rights. 90% of women walked off their jobs & homes, shutting down the entire country. The men could barely cope. Five years later, Iceland elected first female President. Now Iceland has the highest gender equality in the world.

[zn]

from quora

When she applied to run in the Boston Marathon in 1966 they rejected her saying: “Women are not physiologically able to run a marathon, and we can’t take the liability.”

Then exactly 50 years ago today, on the day of the marathon, Bobbi Gibb hid in the bushes and waited for the race to begin. When about half of the runners had gone past she jumped in.

She wore her brother’s Bermuda shorts, a pair of boy’s sneakers, a bathing suit, and a sweatshirt. As she took off into the swarm of runners, Gibb started to feel overheated, but she didn’t remove her hoodie. “I knew if they saw me, they were going to try to stop me,” she said. “I even thought I might be arrested.”

It didn’t take long for male runners in Gibb’s vicinity to realize that she was not another man. Gibb expected them to shoulder her off the road, or call out to the police. Instead, the other runners told her that if anyone tried to interfere with her race, they would put a stop to it. Finally feeling secure and assured, Gibb took off her sweatshirt.

As soon as it became clear that there was a woman running in the marathon, the crowd erupted—not with anger or righteousness, but with pure joy, she recalled. Men cheered. Women cried.

By the time she reached Wellesley College, the news of her run had spread, and the female students were waiting for her, jumping and screaming. The governor of Massachusetts met her at the finish line and shook her hand. The first woman to ever run the marathon had finished in the top third.”

[zn]

[zn]

Tom@fieldsszn01

The victim reported right away, got a rape kit done, had horrendous injuries, reported to SDSU. Student-athletes turned in anonymous tips and the DA won’t even TRY!?!

[zn]

Mohamad Safa@mhdksafa

Overheard: Men tend to choose higher paying careers like doctor, lawyer, CEO or engineer. Women tend to choose lower paying careers like female doctor, female lawyer, female CEO or female engineer

[zn]

I'm sorry ladies, but these young men want you to know that if you have pronouns in your bio or you voted for Biden, then you can't get with them even if you're a 10 pic.twitter.com/2dd2gxgrHx

— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) January 5, 2023

 

[zn]

Rex Chapman@RexChapman

An Alabama youth girls’ basketball team that was told they would lose their practice facility unless they agreed to play in a boys’ league went on to win the whole thing — and yet was denied the championship trophy. Instead, the trophies were given to the boys who, to be clear

were beaten by the girls in the league final.” End.

…

This is absolutely outrageous and should be a bigger story.

Alabama girls' basketball team denied championship after being forced to play in boys' league, then winning it https://t.co/We41cXCswV

— Julie DiCaro (@JulieDiCaro) March 5, 2023

[zn]

Misogynistic Christian fascist Nick Fuentes says women are "intrigued" by him but have to pretend like they're not: "A lot of women want to be raped. … A lot of women really want a guy to beat the shit out of them, but part of it is that they have to pretend that they don't." pic.twitter.com/ccmRZrp1G8

— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) March 20, 2023

[Author]

Posts