We should always add a mental asterisk to the names of male researchers who discovered things while women were oppressed.
That said, this meme is playing loose and fast with the specifics, which undermines that important message.
Just picking the first one:
Payne’s work was her Ph.D. thesis and Russell did not tell her not to publish it, her advisor did. The advisor told her not to rock the boat in her thesis. This is good advice that even Einstein was given. Payne, badass, declined.
When Russell later reproduced her research, he cited her thesis as the “most important research” he’d seen on the subject.
The real snub with Payne is that her title was “Technical Advisor” for 20 years despite being well regarded as a full time professor. It wasn’t until the 50’s she was recognized as a professor, when she was also made chair of the department.
Source: https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosmic-horizons-book/cecilia-payne-profile
They’re all like that. For some reason trying to make the men out as bad people… When nothing really happened. Wish people could try to appreciate women’s contributions without trying to diminish men’s contributions or create a false narrative.
See also Rosalind Franklin who first discovered DNA’s double helix structure (three men later received the Nobel Prize for this finding).
And more examples here.
Franklin might have won the prize, had she not died 4 years before the prize was awarded. Rules forbid the Nobel being awarded to the deceased.
When I took some astronomy classes in the early 2000s, Jocelyn Bell was absolutely credited. In her own words:
It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the Nobel Prize awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of pulsars. There are several comments that I would like to make on this: First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve. Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too. Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases, and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not myself upset about it - after all, I am in good company, am I not!
That said, yeah, I think she absolutely should have been awarded the Nobel prize. But while she did not, she has the admiration — rightly so — of many a budding astronomer.
Lise Meitner went on to be forgotten? In my city, a big street bears her name, including the tram station there. Fittingly, it’s the tram to the University that stops there. Essentially, her name is hammered into all students’ heads here.
Not to mention she’s been immortalized as Meitnerium
Also she herself said that Otto Hahn deserved the Nobel prize. She and Otto Frisch (far kess known than she is!) did the theoretical work regarding the physics behind it.
But Pauli got the physics prize that year, and he sure deserves it. Maybe one of the later prices could have been awarded to her.
Some of the best evidence we discovered for tectonic plates was discovered by a woman. Marie Tharp discovered the Mid-Atlantic ridge and had her work stolen by her colleague.
