The Women Who Contributed to Science but Were Buried in Footnotes

[OtepotiLilliane42]

Fascinating article from The Atlantic about the hidden history of women in science uncovered by a dedicated group of researchers'

Over the past few years, a team of students led by Emilia Huerta-Sánchez from Brown University and Rori Rohlfs from San Francisco State University have been searching through two decades’ worth of acknowledgments in genetics papers and discovering women who were never given the credit that would be expected for today’s researchers.
The duo recruited five undergraduate students, who looked at every issue of a single journal—Theoretical Population Biology—published between 1970 and 1990. They pored through hard copies of almost 900 papers, pulled out every name in the acknowledgments, worked out whether they did any programming, and deduced their genders where possible.

As someone who spent 11 years working as a research archivist I can readily appreciate the hard work, and the joy of the hunt experienced by this group. It's really nice to know that this kind of work is being done.

www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/02/womens-history-in-science-hidden-footnotes/582472/

That's so interesting. Thanks for sharing

Adding my thanks to Orchid’s. Thanks OtepotiLilliane42.

Thanks for posting that, it's a fascinating read. I hope that things are better now, but I wouldn't be certain of it, sadly.

Excellent stuff. Hidden Figures was a great film.

Last few books I've read about women in late 1700s early 1800s illustrate how easily women were sidelined in the jostling for scientific discovery. Didn't stop their tenacious work, though class barriers could. Dr James Barry (same book title) Mary Anning (The Dinosaur Hunters), Mary Somerville and Caroline Herschel (The Age of Wonder)

Dane Jocelyn Bell Burrell, whose male supervisor got the Nobel prize for a discovery she made...

As an ex researcher, that is so sad for those women to be buried like that. How arrogant/ deluded must those men have been to think this was ok?!

I think in many cases a married scientist often relied on his wife. Faraday did theory and Mrs did experiments my dad said