Where are the female geniuses?
I’m getting a bit of roasting over on Forbes.com for gender bias – there were exactly zero women mentioned in the article.
Women are in fact my favorite half of the species. But my problem is the assumption that omission of diversity implies bias. I happen to be Ukrainian by heritage. Yet, there were zero Ukrainians mentioned in my post. Sure, there are a ridiculously smaller number of Ukrainians in the world than women, but the fact that I didn’t mention any of either doesn’t mean I went out of my way to exclude them.
In a 790 word article it’s not a surprise I used the most well known geniuses I could think of. It makes stronger points, provides more leverage and requires less explaining. All things useful to do in a short piece where comprehensiveness isn’t expected.
To get to the point, the fact is women and most minorities were denied many intellectual and creative opportunities in many cultures through Western history. The right to go to school, to publish, to research were denied and for generations there was an unnatural bias against women and minorities that repressed the possibility of them discovering or displaying their talents.
But regardless of the reason, if you study great creative and intellectual works in Western history, many of them were done by men. This does not mean men are better at becoming geniuses (however you define the term) than women – far from it – it just means that’s what happened. If you talk about innovation history, a disproportionate number of stories will involve men. Same for leaders of nations and authors of books – generally speaking, for hundreds of years, in most of Europe, women were not allowed to do either.
I was asked about this bias by the President of CMU when I lectured there last year, and the above answer is basically what i said then.
I do happen to know of many female geniuses or women of extraordinary or creative abilities. They didn’t fit this piece, but I’ve studied them. Here’s my list of favorites:
- Marie Curie – First person in history to win two Nobel Prizes (only other person to do it was Linus Pauling). She also discovered this little thing called radioactivity, a discovery she died for.
- Ada Lovelace – The first computer programmer in history. She is possibly an example of historic gender bias, as some of the work Babbage is credited with should be attributed to her.
- Georgia Okeefe – The movements of her creative work over a prolific lifetime are comparable to Picasso’s in many ways.
- Jane Austen – In many ways helped define the style and structure of the concept of a modern novel. I’m actually not a fan of her writing, but her impact and influence is worthy of study anyway – especially as her fame and influence was largely posthumous.
My favorite is Hedy Lamarr. She was not only a famous and glamorous Hollywood star, she is also accountable for the invention of frequency hopping which serves as a basis for modern spread-spectrum communication technology, such as COFDM used in WiFi network connections and CDMA used in some cordless and wireless telephones.
Unfortunately, like so many genious minds, she was ahead of her time and her invention was not feasible for the mechanical technology in 1942. She never made any money out of her patent and only later (in 1962), after the patent had expired, it was implemented and used by U.S. military ships during a blockade of Cuba.
Cheers, Mike
There are tons more of course – here’s a good list from metafilter – including a list of female Nobel Prize winners. Emily Dickinson should probably make my list, but i haven’t read her in decades – need to fix that.
The more I poke at this, the more I’m reminded i hate the word genius. Like the word innovation, it’s an abused label that distracts from the important things we should be looking at.
– Did the person contribute significantly to their field?
– Did they influence other great works?
– Were their works consistently superior or useful?
Forget the tools the person was born with or how old they were when they did their work – the above three criteria are better frameworks than the g word.
As soon as people start saying Sally is a genius, but Fred isn’t, and they both fit the above criteria, you know they’re splitting hairs. Who cares if one or the other was slightly more prolific or influential? They’re all amazing. I doubt any of them cared much how they were stack ranked on lists of top geniuses or whatever. They were too busy doing work to care.
How timely. Lest we forget, International Womens’ Day is to be celebrated this weekend on 3/8. Check out the history of this holiday on Wikipedia….
Linus Paulig also was awarded with two Nobel prizes (Chemistry and Peace).
Germán: correct. But they are the only two, and she was the first.
“I’m actually not a fan of he writing”….
‘he writing’ when referring to a woman, hmm?
I call bias.
S – You caught me. (Fixed typo)
It’s said that a genius learns without studying, and knows without learning. That he is eloquent without preparation, exact without calculation, and profound without reflection.
Nice quote! Did you watch “Little Man Tate” recently?