"Interviewing all Ph.D. candidates, male and Christian"

[2xx1xy1JD]

You know how Lori and Ken and SSM and assorted fundies and MRA types like to spout bullshit like "did you know that men built and invented practically everything, everywhere?", and try to argue that OF COURSE women simply weren't designed to know anything about science and aren't designed for anything but diaper duty?

I assume that most of you know that's complete bullshit, but if you ever need some concrete arguments against that crap, here's some ammo.

Women didn't get more patents and recognition, because they weren't hired even when they were perfectly qualified. In 1937, it was common for job postings at Columbia University to specify that candidates should be male and Christian.

http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/cohn-mildred

Her colleague, Gerta Cori, also didn't get a full professorship until shortly before she won her Nobel Prize.

http://www.kveller.com/blog/parenting/t ... after-her/

These women were the fortunate cream of the crop, and they STILL faced massive discrimination.

DNA is a household word today, but much of the early work done to figure out its molecular structure came from Rosalind Franklin - who never got the credit she deserved.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin

[PennySycamore]

I was waiting for you to mention Rosalind Franklin. I first heard about her in my college genetics class. My teacher basically said that Watson and Crick never would have gotten so far without her work. It's so sad that she died before the Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA could be awarded.

I recall learning the Cori cycle in biochemistry, of course, but I wasn't aware about much about the wife and husband behind its discovery.

To my chagrin, I don't think I'd heard about Mildred Cohn before. That's a shame because she was so accomplished.

[jaynie]

I read recently an article suggesting that Einstein's first wife contributed significantly to the theory of relativity, to the extent that she may have originally been listed as a co-author. I didn't have time to fact check the article, unfortunately, but its an intriguing idea. She was a highly gifted woman, at any rate - the only one accepted to her university at the time.

Women's achievements, historically, have often been credited to their husbands. If they were credited at all. A lot of artistic work that was done by women is anonymous.

[2xx1xy1JD]

I read recently an article suggesting that Einstein's first wife contributed significantly to the theory of relativity, to the extent that she may have originally been listed as a co-author. I didn't have time to fact check the article, unfortunately, but its an intriguing idea. She was a highly gifted woman, at any rate - the only one accepted to her university at the time.

Women's achievements, historically, have often been credited to their husbands. If they were credited at all. A lot of artistic work that was done by women is anonymous.

Getting proper credit was a huge problem. Since a patent is a form of intellectual property, women couldn't get patents in their own names until they were given the right to have separate property.

[karen77]

Don't forget about:

Marie Skłodowska-Curie (7 November 1867 – 4 July 1934) was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only woman to win in two fields, and the only person to win in multiple sciences. She was also the first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris, and in 1995 became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Panthéon in Paris

She did a lot of great work, and died early for it too. But as a woman, I'm sure it wasn't really her doing the work, right?? although, I think she gets the credit now, but who knows when her findings first came out.

[PennySycamore]

Marie was never elected to the French Academy of Sciences because of her sex and neither was her Nobel-laureate daughter, Irene Curie-Joliot.

Marie and Pierre had a civil union when they married because they did not want a religious ceremony. Marie's cookbooks are still too "hot" to handle without protective clothing.

[dairyfreelife]

There's a lot of evidence that Mozart's sister, Maria Anna, was also very talented musically, but we'll never know to what extent as she did what all women did in her day...marry, have children, give up all your work for those two things.

[GeoBQn]

I bet the fundies blew their stacks over the recent episode of Cosmos that highlighted the accomplishments of female astronomers--Annie Jump Cannon (left deaf by scarlet fever), Henrietta Swan Leavitt (also deafened by illness), and Cecilia Payne.

I was fascinated to learn that Helen Keller was a feminist, a socialist, and one of the first white supporters of the NAACP. She became a socialist after she did research on blindness and discovered that the lower classes were more at risk for it due to illness and occupational hazards. Her political activism is left out of all the feel-good accounts of her life. She overcame her disabilities . . . to do what? You wouldn't know it from textbooks.

[Angharad Crewe]

There is also Barbara McClintock, who won an unshared Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for her discovery of transposons.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock

[RachelB]

If you're interested in the 16th and 17th century, when science as we know it was just coalescing, the book The Mind Has No Sex offers a great overview of female scientists, many of whom didn't have access to the necessary lab equipment, let alone proper education, managed to do pretty cool things nonetheless.