And as to your science and feminism rant — it’s completely and entirely off base -an object lesson in grasping and posturing for dominance within the hierarchy and being upset when you are told you aren’t allowed to. Academia and STEM in particular are notoriously sexist, hostile, harassing and aggressive about trying to keep women in their place. The fact that they don’t like to be called out on that is irrelevant.
Science historically and still to this day systemically discounted and marginalized the contributions of women scientists. None-the-less, much of what we now understand about primates is due to female researchers like Dian Fosse and Jane Goodall who undertook their study in a new and non-dominating kind of way- allowing us to learn all kinds of new things about primates by integrating with them.
“In our experience and the studies we’ve seen, there is no meritocracy in science,” said Zelikova. “There is a structured, hierarchical system where people in power tend to benefit from being in power and white men continued to benefit from the structures that they built.”
“The system was working as it intended to. It just wasn’t working for us,” she said, noting that “us” also includes people of color and all underrepresented groups.”
And from a Facebook post about Cecilia Payne, just one of the many women scientists names we ought to all learn in school, but never did………
“Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.”
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Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)
OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE.
Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.
Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.
Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”
Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne — after telling her not to publish).
Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.
Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.
Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.
