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Women Geniuses: the Latest Thing

Best meme I’ve seen in months and I’ll tell you why:

“Behind every great woman is a team of men who did all the actual work.”

There’s a new thing around. A narrative. Very PC. It’s all the rage. It basically goes “a brilliant woman invented X, Y or Z but never got any credit for it because sexist White men hogged all the credit because White men are chauvinist pigs who keep women down.” That’s the usual, basic narrative.

Example: I just saw such a narrative two days ago on the internet that basically went: “a female physicist helped win WWII for the allies by inventing anti-radar technology that allowed allied airplanes to avoid German radar.” She was brilliant! A genius! Sure. Right. Okay. (Did you know that an Italian woman invented Velcro? Yeah. She was pulling a wool sweater over her head and it got caught on her mustache. *rim shot* Couldn’t resist. Velcro was actually invented by Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral in 1941).

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Example: I just saw such a narrative two days ago on the internet that basically went: “a female physicist helped win WWII for the allies by inventing anti-radar technology that allowed allied airplanes to avoid German radar.” She was brilliant! A genius! Sure. Right. Okay.

OK, now if you had an actual point to make, here’s where you’d tell everybody about the men who supposedly “did the actual work” instead of making a dumb joke.

Hedy. Lamarr.

Frankly, I can see why Bill and Ted curbed So-Crates for the sequels, if he's this much of an asshole.

Actually the true statement would be “Behind every great person is a team of persons who laid the foundations of their work”. No matter who, the narrative of single individuals and geniuses coming up with ideas totally in a vacuum is simply not true. Every scientist builds on what came before, whether they be men, women or nonbinary, it doesn’t matter. That doesn’t mean at all that the individual contribution is negligible, just that your oh so funny and misogynistic meme doesn’t work in multiple ways.
Ada Lovelace was the first person to find out that computers could be used for more than just calculation.
Maria Sibylla Merian was one of the first people to study insects directly.
Marie Curie (sadly and accidentally) gave her life for her discoveries of the properties of radioactivity, and she is still the only person with two nobel prizes in scientific fields (and a personal idol of mine).
Laura Bassi, one of the first women who was granted a doctorate might be one of the best examples for why you are talking out of your ass: She lived in the 18th century, had no formal education at first, but had the luck of being discovered for her talents and gaining a patron. She successfully defended her mathematical and philosophical theses and was one of the first women to be allowed to teach at the university (though not all-male classes).
What does her story tell you? Up until then women didn’t even get the chance to get a higher education. If they wanted to do science they were pretty much forced to do so privately and as autodidacts and their research was usually ignored anyway. I said it before with the allegedly lacking contribution of gay people to society and science (poor Turing as well as Lovelace, their accomplishments being talked away on the very machines they helped develop) and it fits here again: You can’t oppress them all for multiple millenia and then use that oppression as proof that they never contributed in any way.
In fact, what amazing thing did YOU contribute to society? Being alive as a straight cis-man? Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but that’s definitely not an accomplishment on its own. So fuck off and learn a bit of real history instead of praising memes you like and hating on memes you don’t like!

White Shitists that think they can think.

Best meme I've seen in months, Soak Rates. [/Doug Piranha-levels of sarcasm]

If it's possible for your single brain cell, subhuman, think about Wi-Fi & Bluetooth next time you use them.

Don't look up 'Spread Spectrum Frequency Hopping' - certainly who invented it - if you value your entire 'argument', Soak Rates.

After all: you wouldn't want to be thought of as a hypocrite for using something invented by one of teh ebil girlies who are educated: and therefore superior to you, eh...?!

Wanna bet George Mestral was likely a guy who had a vague idea while the female inventor put it into practice and perfected it? That’s probably the case with all those mysterious white guys ethnicists point to when trying to “disprove” black inventors and innovators.

Also, someone needs to write rebuttal pieces to those “Black person / Woman didn’t really invent this but some really obscure white guy did it” screeds.

Also, the OP’s argument style does not provide any real “rebuttal”, he needs to conjure up more than the Velcro story.

It really grinds his gears that one of the pioneers of WiFi was a glamorous, sexy “Golden Age” movie actress named Hedy Lamarr. He can only contemplate hot babes as bimbos with the IQ of cheese. He could never fathom that that luscious creature who played Delilah in an earlier version of Samson & Delilah (as well as did an actual sex scene… in the early 1930s… in the Czech movie, Ecstasy) was a mathematical genius who laid the foundations for WiFi (and Ms. Lamarr wasn’t too enthused about people liking her just for her looks while ignoring her brains)!

Maybe I should sick Millicent Patrick’s creation, The Gill Man on his guy!

“Behind every great woman is a team of men who did all the actual work”

Tghanks you for noticing scholars, artists and inventors stand on the shoulder of giants.

Hypatia would have been very interested to know it was the “latest thing”. But trust a clueless git like you to say things the exact opposite to what they actually are, because it was often the women who did the actual work, but the men who got all the kudos. That’s what happened to Rosalind Franklin…

It's strange because the statement was made less than a year ago. One would think that most people today know better, with excellent lessons throughout history that make this type of joke distasteful.