taking off the rose-tinted glasses

[quarrel]

Here’s a case in point about being impressed too easily.

May 9th’s xkcd strip features a budding female student idolizing famous chemist Marie Curie. Curie herself informs the student there are other accomplished women among history’s scientists and mathematicians, names two in particular, claims that they and their accomplishments are disregarded due to cultural male bias, and advises the student to strive to become famous consequentially, as a side effect of dedication and accomplishment, rather than as a goal in itself.

Inspirational and profound, right? Well, maybe. I thought so at first, at least regarding the final point. Then I read into the comments thread. Now, comment threads on the internet are generally ugly, uneducated things, but the xkcd forums are less ugly and more educated than most. And they weren’t kind to this strip.

First and foremost, and obvious to me once it was pointed out, is that the strip’s final piece of serious advice is a non sequitur. It’s a sentiment that the strip’s author, Randall Munroe, has expressed before, and it’s something I personally agree with, but it’s not supported by anything that appears before it. If the strip had no other flaws, this would still hobble it single-handedly.

Then there are factual issues with both other famous women named in the strip. According to Randall, Lise Meitner’s accolades for her physics work amount to a National Women’s Press Club award and a posthumous element named for her while her coworkers earned Nobels and, in Enrico Fermi’s case, lasting name recognition. The truth is that she earned several major awards and academic honors, albeit in her home country and not the U.S. Thus it isn’t her gender keeping her from fame in the U.S. so much as it is America’s low regard for academic history in general. Also, Randall claims it was Meitner who first conjectured that uranium nuclei were splitting into two other elements while her partner was still pondering lab results, but letters by the two scientists don’t support that claim, suggesting instead they cautiously approached that idea together or that the partner embraced it first.

Randal’s treatment of Emmy Noether is also flawed. He claims she never got paid to give lectures and often had to register a time slot using a male accomplice’s name, but she got a paid position in 1923 in Germany (granted, this was after years of unpaid work) and another in the U.S. after fleeing the Nazis in 1933. There was also a claim that the gender discrimination used to deny her her first position was only a means to an end, and the actual underlying reason was internal rivalry between her mentor and the philosophy department.

Then there’s Curie. Three or four different posters pointed out that the woman herself went by the surname Skłodowska-Curie, thus Randall is ignorant and/or sexist by not honoring that, even as he attempts to do well by her.

Certainly, women have been discriminated against for centuries in a variety of professional fields. I’d be crazy to deny that. But a comic that alleges to highlight that fact does so poorly and for the wrong reason, and it turns itself from a noble cause into an erudite version of that “Hang in there!” poster with the kitten and the branch. And if you’re too easily impressed by things, you’ll never notice.