The Women I Never Learned About

When I was younger I was a huge fan of Marie Curie. My elementary school class did a "wax museum" where we all did a report on someone and dressed up as them. I naturally picked Marie Curie. The reason I was so stuck on Marie Curie was because at that point she was pretty much the only female scientist I had heard of, the only woman in science that had come up in my elementary school curriculum. This is interesting, considering the important contributions women have made.

• I learned about Watson and Crick discovering the double-helix shape of DNA in middle school. I didn't learn about Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray photos were used without her knowledge or permission, and who was not credited with this large albeit unwitting contribution.
• I only heard about Lise Meitner because I wrote a report in high school about the atomic bomb. She discovered nuclear fission, and should therefore be at least mentioned next to the Manhattan Project that used that concept, but instead it took me some digging to discover her.
•  Mary Anning was a palaeontologist who discovered many "firsts" of dinosaur fossils. I only learned about her because I stumbled upon a small book about her when I was bored and out of things to read. She revolutionized palaeontology and most people have never heard of her (unless they were curious about the google doodle that reminded me I had a subject to rant about today)
• Computers are a guy thing, right? Wrong. Charles Babbage may have built the first computer, but Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer programs. In fact, computer programming was first considered a woman's job, until male programmers decided they wanted less competition for jobs. Grace Hopper (another person made slightly more well-known via Google) developed the first compiler, as well as popularizing the term "debugging."

This is hardly a complete list. In fact, these women are mostly white, meaning I will have to dig deeper to learn the names of female scientists of color who have been even more obscured by ignorance. Ignoring the achievements of people who are not white men is incredibly prevalent in many fields. I read a back-of-the-book summary on an H. G. Wells book proclaiming him the father of science fiction. An interesting title, considering Frankenstein was written (by Mary Shelley, a woman) nearly fifty years before H. G. Wells was born. (Interesting how a genre effectively created by a woman is now considered a male-dominated genre, and any women who express interest are accused of doing so for male attention... but that's a whole other post.)
In science, many women who made discoveries received no awards for them or had co-workers steal their work, and then were ignored by history. This is absurd, as it makes it seem like female scientists are rare and unusual. This is wrong, because it dismisses the advances that women have made in science. This is unfair, because it takes away potential inspiration from young women like me who have an interest in science. So when people learn I'm studying physics, it's virtually unheard of for them. They are impressed that I'm studying a field that women rarely go into, when they should be impressed that I am in a field that makes it difficult for women to succeed.
One of my professors, when introducing a concept, often says "we love famous dead people, because they've already done the work for us." Unfortunately, it seems all the love is given to the famous dead white men.