[pfannkuchen]

Would you be “snipe”ing like this if a man were plagiarized? As far as I’m aware, this isn’t completely unheard of in science, at least historically if not today. Would they not have done the same if it were a more junior man? Like sure if he walked up to them and literally gave them the idea, they may not have (in either case), but with the circumstances as I understand them to be, I think this kind of thing happens all the time?

[zimpenfish]

> Would you be “snipe”ing like this if a man were plagiarized?

When men have had their scientific advances plagiarised, stolen, claimed from them in the same quantity as non-men, sure, but that's like saying "you're complaining that I stole a million pounds but they stole a can of coke!" Nonsense whataboutism.

[pfannkuchen]

It isn’t whataboutism, I’m not deflecting. What I’m alluding to is that there is some moral crusade these days about women’s historical achievements that seems to have veered into conspiracy theorist tier paranoia lately. Men weren’t rubbing their hands and twirling their mustaches and stealing women’s inventions to keep them down, there were just more classical gender role norms back then. We can certainly tut tut at the social pressure to stay at home with children back then and how that did prevent some women from inventing things, or how men didn’t take women seriously in industry because that wasn’t their role in the classical role setup, but this notion that men are or were somehow out to get women is silly.

If anything though I think the real problem is actually being inverted. At the time when women began pushing or being pushed into industry and academia, why did we value industry and academia over what the women were doing at the time? Caring for children seems pretty important, and outsourcing that to under-resourced strangers and in many cases foreigners as we do today is quite odd when you think about it.

[jadamson]

Tell us about how Hedy Lamarr invented Wi-Fi, how Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, how Margaret Hamilton wrote the software for the moon landings, and then repeat this claim.

[zimpenfish]

Sure and then you can tell me about Marion Donovan, Nettie Stevens, Vera Rubin, Lise Meitner, Alice Ball, Margaret Knight, Elizabeth Magie, Margaret Keane, Candace Pert, and the hundreds of others.

(Bonus points if you know even 3 of those without looking them up)

[jadamson]

Let's see...

Marion Donovan appears to have invented a "diaper cover" among other things, her patent then being ignored by several companies. Unfortunate, but I've never heard of whoever supposedly stole credit for that ground-breaking invention either, so it hardly seems relevant. I'd hope in the age of Ali Express and Temu that I don't need to point out how often men's patents get ignored.

I had heard of Nettie Stevens. Her work was not stolen, she published after Edmund Beecher Wilson.

Vera Rubin presented the very controversial theory of dark matter. Given that she worked closely with a male collaborator, Kent Ford, who co-authored many of her papers, it seems more likely that their work was overlooked due to initial resistance to the theory itself.

Lise Meitner was a Jew in Nazi Germany.

Alice Ball's work seems to have been stolen after she died in isolation in a leprosy colony. I'd never heard of Arthur Dean either.

I'll stop there as this will take forever otherwise. What you have listed seem to be extremely tenuous as evidence of gender bias - one can quite easily hop on Google and find plenty of examples of stolen inventions, from automatic windscreen wipers to Facebook.