[DoreenMichele]

Franklin... died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at just 37

This is news to me. I've heard before that supposedly her work was "stolen" by men in the field. I have always thought it more likely that she thought she needed more evidence or something like that. Women seem to have trouble getting good mentors and, like Vinny in My Cousin Vinny, may be weak when it comes to procedure -- aka the culture of the appropriate way to do things and get it taken seriously, etc.

Knowing she died so young makes me think this is largely why she "lacked adequate recognition" in the eyes of people crying sexism. I doubt that. I've heard of her and heard hand-wavy versions of how some guy stole from her or whatever but never looked into it because such stories tend to be framed in a way that frequently strikes me as biased and counterproductive as a woman trying to find my own path forward.

Women do face challenges. My opinions as to what those challenges are tend to differ from popular framing.

And this section fits more with my view of such things:

Franklin did not succeed, partly because she was working on her own without a peer with whom to swap ideas. She was also excluded from the world of informal exchanges in which Watson and Crick were immersed.

[andrewflnr]

Dying young is not generally a problem for getting recognition. Certainly there are lots of famous discoverers who died young (Evariste Galois comes to mind, but is maybe too extreme an example to be representative).

I agree the impact of informal communication likely played an underrated role.

[DoreenMichele]

She didn't receive the Nobel Prize because it's only given to people still alive. She had already died.

Scientists et al tend to be recognized in old age or after their death, not while still relatively young. This is so true that we have special awards specifically designed to recognize people under a certain age, such as The Fields Medal for mathematicians under age 40.

There are 64 Fields Medalist. Only one is a woman.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fields_Medal#:~:text=In%2020....

Edit: I will add that the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields is a woman: Marie Curie.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Curie

[dekhn]

it's unlikely franklin would have been the third recipient of the prize even if she had not passed away. From what we can infer from the extant data, she didn't have the core realization that DNA formed a double helix and that structure was precisely linked to its function as a template for genetic reproduction. ANd she didn't really have the core recognition of base-pairing that enables the double helix.

[DoreenMichele]

I'm not arguing that she definitely, slam dunk, would have been included had she lived. I'm arguing that she couldn't even be considered due to having died beforehand.

Scientific recognition tends to come in old age or posthumously. She's getting hers posthumously.

That's not some bizarroland weird statistical outlier that only happens to women due to sexism denying them credit during their lifetime.

Gregor Mendel is remembered as the father of genetics. His work wasn't recognized until 30 years or so after his death.

Alfred Wegener came up with the theory of plate tectonics. It didn't gain acceptance until 20 years or so after his death.

[msrenee]

Was she excluded from that world of informal exchanges due to pride, personality, or sexism? I can guess myself. That blurb doesn't necessarily mean that she was bad at networking.

[DoreenMichele]

Men being uncomfortable making small talk with female colleagues for fear of it being misinterpreted by someone strikes me as a serious barrier to female professionals successfully networking.

It also strikes me as an unfortunate happenstance and not a conscious and intentional plot to deny women career advancement.

[msrenee]

We're talking about the 50s. There was almost no fear of repercussions from being inappropriate towards women in the workplace. You might run into an angry husband or brother, and that was about it.

It was the height of the housewife era. Women were actively discouraged from working and there was a massive amount of clear and outright sexism towards those who chose to have a career. It seems much more likely to me that they didn't consider her an equal part of the team and that's why she was left out of the story.

[DoreenMichele]

If you actually want to be faithful to your own wife, you might fear it being misinterpreted by the female colleague as you hitting on her.

The height of the housewife era was funded in part by the high savings rates during WW2 when many married couples were de facto DINKs -- dual income, no kids -- because she was Rosie the Riveter, he was serving in the military overseas and, as Lucille Ball once said, you can't exactly get pregnant by phoning it in.

Furthermore, most scenarios contain myriad factors and I'm much more interested in finding a path forward than in figuring out who to blame for the past.

[anonymouskimmer]

> The height of the housewife era was funded in part by the high savings rates during WW2 when many married couples were de facto DINKs

Sure, but it didn't help that women were encouraged (or forced) to leave their jobs so that the returning men could have them. It's not coincidental that "Kelly Girl Services" and the general temp agency (which has been so much bad for both women and men in terms of wages, job security, and promotion opportunities) took off in this era. Or Freidan's best-seller status in 1963.

> I'm much more interested in finding a path forward than in figuring out who to blame for the past.

Blame helps in figuring out what to address. At the very least a sense of past injustice motivates people in the present to address present wrongs.

It's important to cast blame for the actions and attitudes of people, because the basic motivations behind those actions and attitudes don't change, they're effectively eternal with the human race. The light needs to constantly be shined on them, or you get women like Eileen Bailey and Ann Coles[1], or men like Eddie Slovik[2]. The shining of the light is the path forward, or at least a part of it. Does it matter whether COVID came from a Chinese lab or a wet market, now? No. But the shining of the light on the bad practices at both places is the most likely way to see that both sets of practices are corrected. (I do think it was stupid to cast blame back in 2020 and 21, when really we needed to be better addressing the critical urgency of contagion.)

1 - https://daily.jstor.org/what-really-made-1950s-housewives-so...

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Slovik#Execution

[DoreenMichele]

I don't agree with you at all. I don't even know what ugly thing you are trying to say about the three people you named.

If you look for someone to blame, you will find someone to blame. But that someone may be a scapegoat.

The US legal system is based on an assumption of innocence. I find it personally useful to try to assess history from an assumption of innocence.

Many phenomenon are emergent phenomenon that cannot be blamed on any one thing.

If I think someone is actually guilty of something in specific, I have no problem saying that. I just don't find an assumption of guilt useful in the general case for parsing how to do this better.