6 Women Scientists Who Were Snubbed Due to Sexism

[ismnotwasm]

In April, National Geographic News published a story about the letter in which scientist Francis Crick described DNA to his 12-year-old son. In 1962, Crick was awarded a Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA, along with fellow scientists James Watson and Maurice Wilkins.

Several people posted comments about our story that noted one name was missing from the Nobel roster: Rosalind Franklin, a British biophysicist who also studied DNA. Her data were critical to Crick and Watson's work, but as several commenters noted, Franklin was robbed of recognition. (See her section below for details.)

She was not the first woman to have endured indignities in the male-dominated world of science, but Franklin's case is especially egregious, said Ruth Lewin Sime, a retired chemistry professor at Sacramento City College who has written on women in science.

Over the centuries, female researchers have had to work as "volunteer" faculty members, seen credit for significant discoveries they've made assigned to male colleagues, and been written out of textbooks.

They typically had paltry resources and fought uphill battles to achieve what they did, only "to have the credit attributed to their husbands or male colleagues," said Anne Lincoln, a sociologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas, who studies biases against women in the sciences.

Today's women scientists believe that attitudes have changed, said Laura Hoopes at Pomona College in California, who has written extensively on women in the sciences—"until it hits them in the face." Bias against female scientists is less overt, but it has not gone away.

Here are six female researchers who did groundbreaking work—and whose names are likely unfamiliar for one reason: because they are women.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130519-women-scientists-overlooked-dna-history-science/

[hlthe2b]

1. It would be difficut to name six female researcherss in the past centuries who weren't snubbed...

Even Marie Curie is inevitably described in terms of her "working alongside her husband", which while fine to mention they were a team, also suggests to many that she would not have risen to prominence without him.

If one looks at parity among Scientists and University Professors today, the progress remains despairingly slow.

[longship]

2. Well, part of this is complete bunkum.

Right off the bat they imply that Rosalind Franklin not winning the Nobel Prize because she was a woman. This is so easy to debunk that I am shocked that National Geographic let this be printed on their site.

Rosalind Franklin did not win the Nobel Prize in 1962 because she was not qualified to win it. Why? Because Rosalind Franklin died of cancer in 1958 and the Nobel Prize is never given posthumously.

The others listed are correct, though, AFAIK.

One notable point. The first scientist to win two Nobel Prizes and the only person to win in two sciences was a woman, Marie Curie who won in 1903 in Physics and 1911 in Chemistry.

There is no doubt that there has been bias against women in science. But it does no good to make fraudulent claims or just making shit up.

I hope this sheds some light on this topic.

[hlthe2b]

4. No, you are propagating bunkum

Still, most accounts ascribe Franklin’s snub not to the lack of esteem held by her fellow scientists, but to the belief that Nobel committee rules barred the posthumous awarding of the Nobel Prize.

This belief is wrong. Until 1974, the prize could be awarded to a deceased person, as long as he or she had been nominated before February of that year. Their nominations enabled both Karlfeldt and Hammarskjöld, for example, to became laureates after their deaths.

It was nominations, not awards, that were restricted to the living. Had Franklin been nominated for an award up to 1958, the year of her death, she could have been considered for a Prize that year. But when the sealed 1958 Nobel documents were opened in 2008, they showed that she had never been nominated. So Rosalind Franklin did not fail to receive a Nobel Prize solely because she had died.

She was dead in 1962 when the DNA triumvirate received the Prize, but why was it awarded a full nine years after the discovery of DNA’s structure was reported in Nature? Today this delay sounds reasonable, because now, the committee has come to award discoveries that have withstood test of time. However the rules of Franklin’s era indicated that the award was in recognition of discoveries made “during the preceding year.” Had this rule been adhered to, the Prize would have been awarded in 1954, when Franklin was still alive.

Today’s rules stipulate that only those who die after their award is announced, as William Vickery did, can receive it posthumously. But even that rule is not absolute: The announcement of Steinman’s Nobel Prize was made last year only after the committee discovered that he had died the previous Friday. Technically, this is against the rules, and the Steinman Nobel demonstrates the latitude the committee can take when it wishes to.

Some such as Matt Ridley, Francis Crick’s biographer, claim that Franklin didn’t merit a Nobel because she would never have solved the puzzle of DNA. Why, some ask, did she not make the discovery first if she had collected all the necessary data? Franklin was, by all accounts, a careful, painstaking scientist, and instead of wildly proposing unworkable structures, as both Watson and Linus Pauling had done at some point, she preferred to be slower, and correct. The fact that the others conspired to base their achievement on her purloined data suggests that they well understood its importance.

http://msmagazine.com/blog/2012/12/31/dont-forget-rosalind-franklin/

[longship]

6. The posthumous Nobel Prize policy.

From Wiki:

Although posthumous nominations are not permitted, individuals who die in the months between their nomination and the decision of the prize committee were originally eligible to receive the prize. This has occurred twice: the 1931 Literature Prize awarded to Erik Axel Karlfeldt, and the 1961 Peace Prize awarded to UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld. Since 1974, laureates must be thought alive at the time of the October announcement.

So, I will stand by claim that Rosalind Franklin would not have been eligible for the Nobel Prize any time after 1958. Certainly one has to be first nominated for the prize to receive it and since Franklin died three years before nominations were closed for 1962, it is not likely she was ever considered for that award.

I have no doubt that Franklin experienced gender bias. But not winning the Nobel in 1962 over four years after her death was not an example of this bias since she could not even be nominated for that prize.

Sorry that we disagree about this but I have a dislike for using falsified information to justify a position, even one I support, that women have undoubtedly have been discriminated against in science.

Using the Rosalind Franklin Nobel prize argument only gives opponents a chance to use it as a straw man to deny the main claim that no such discrimination exists. That's why I think it is a flawed strategy.

If you disagree with this, I am not uncomfortable with that and certainly will make no further posts on the issue. No point in getting into a back and forth over an ancillary point when we're in total agreement on the main issue.

On edit: and thank you for your responses.

[hlthe2b]

7. re: "I have no doubt that Franklin experienced gender bias. But not winning the Nobel in 1962 over

four years after her death was not an example of this bias"

Sorry, but I have to call bullshit on that. Even Watson admits as much:

So the big question is, if Franklin had lived, would she or should she, instead of Wilkins, have received the Nobel Prize with Watson and Crick?

There's a big difference between "would" and "should." Should she have? Absolutely. One of the things I proposed last year at AAAS [the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting] is that I think it should be called the Watson-Crick-Franklin structure. As far as I'm concerned, she was a de facto collaborator. Maybe she didn't give them her information directly. But every time they hit a stumbling point, it was her information that they got from Wilkins that straightened it out. So do I think should she have? Absolutely.

Would she have? I'm not so sure. The Nobel Prize could be very political, and often the Nobel Committee would put great emphasis on those who started the research, which in this case was Wilkins. But even Watson begrudgingly says that she should have gotten it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/rosalind-franklin-legacy.html

[longship]

8. Note the "if she had lived" part.

It's supposition, my friend. That's all I am saying here.

I have to conclude that I don't know whether Franklin would have gotten the honor. But I will grant you that she might have not and gender bias would be a plausible explanation. But as she wasn't eligible, we may never know for sure.

I have already said why I think this argument isn't the best strategy, so I'll leave it there.

And thanks again.

[redqueen]

3. "Today's women scientists believe that attitudes have changed..."

[ismnotwasm]

5. No shit

I'm with you, by this this thread alone