A Lady Wrote Men's Biographies As If They Were Women, And She NAILED It

In a world where women were discouraged from pursuing science, Marie Curie's twin Nobel Prizes for her discovery and study of radium more than a hundred years ago were a massive leap forward – and she rightly inspired many young scientists to follow in her footsteps. And yet, the story of great women in science neither begins nor ends with her.

For every Curie, there were plenty of other women like Lise Meitner or Rosalind Franklin who made great scientific contributions from relative obscurity. Meitner grew up in an era where women were outright barred from higher education, while Franklin received no official credit for her part in discovering the double helix structure of DNA.

And while the world more readily recognizes female scientists for their work today, it's still not unheard of for women to be pushed into the background when it comes to deciding the "face" for scientific discoveries.

And there's another, more subtly condescending aspect to the recognition women do get. And Twitter userDaurmith has thought of a fun way of pointing them out.

Namely, she chose to write mini-biographies of male scientists with tropes commonly used to describe their female peers.

Once you see what she came up with, why not try your own out and share them with us?

This is a good way to skewer the "that's a lot of big science for such a little lady" kind of nonsense.

Isaac Newton's looks never entered into his discoveries, so why should anyone else's?

Yeah, I couldn't tell you how many hearts Richard Feynman broke.

And that's because nobody ever wrote about him so breezily before – but it's something a lot of prominent women have to deal with.

And yeah, here's a pretty tired trope.

It's not that there's never any talk about male scientists' family lives, but it's always secondary to their actual work. For women, it's often the opposite

Appropriately, this mini-bio doesn't get into what Oliver Sacks actually accomplished.

This runs parallel to the common mentality of "wow, she's so hot! Oh yeah, and I guess she's a scientist or something."

What's important here is that we know that he was married.

Otherwise, his contributions would totally mean nothing.

"...And a Nobel Prize." As if that's the least important thing here!

It's amazing how worried people used to be about women being unmarried "old maids." And it was just as silly as worrying about Schrödinger's marriageability.