As Virginia Woolf famously said, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.” Historically speaking, women have often been side-lined, either due to peer pressure, lack of opportunity, or flat-out sexism. And many times, women who made discoveries weren’t given credit for their work. Be it the early codes of computer programming, the discovery of the DNA double helix structure, or the splitting the atom, men have mostly claimed those advancements as their own.
These men merely didn’t steal women’s ideas. They published them under their own names, won prizes for them, earned millions from them, became noteworthy men of their time, and computer science vs computer programming in retrospect. While the women whose insight, and intelligence they appropriated ended up merely being footnoted, both in reality and through the lens of history. Here is a list of five such things invented by women that were credited to men.
The scientist duo Watson and Crick are credited with uncovering the double helix formation that would catapult the understanding of human DNA. But the hidden fact is that it was Rosalind Franklin who, while researching at King’s College in 1951, took the X-Ray photographs of DNA double-helix structure. In fact, she presented the photographs in a conference before Watson and Crick’s groundbreaking publication, which itself stands to prove that they were not the first ones to discover it.