University Challenge questions made more difficult so as not to offend anyone

There is most certainly a blindspot to the role of women in history and for various reasons. As Seamus pointed out history tends to be written from a cultural and societal viewpoint and still is. For most of history women were seen and not heard, if they were seen at all. Even so there were a number of prominent women in even the classical world that made waves and in their own time too. Hypatia an obvious one, but there were quite a few others. I' sure there's a list somewhere. And it would be an incomplete list at that, as even the world famous men of that era have large gaps in what has come down to us.

Gender was obviously a large factor, but so was wealth. Thinkers of all stripes almost always came from money, from the top percentage of society. Time to think is expensive. The number of wealthy were always small and the number of wealthy women was smaller again.

In an equal world would the top movers and shakers be split 50/50? I would reckon not. That it would still be skewed towards men at the very top end. This has long been reflected in the various tests into intelligence. They're narrow in focus as tests and don't account for a helluva lot of factors that can lead to truly world class geniuses, but imperfect as they are, what they do show is that the spread of "intelligence" has some gender differences. Namely that more men are represented at the very top and the very bottom of the curve, whereas women tend to have a flatter curve. Fewer complete morons, fewer complete geniuses. Other factors like there are nearly double the number of men with OCD and general obsessiveness can drive this too. Something that can be debilitating, but obsessions have often been behind great leaps forward in human thought. Men also have an advantage in that they can be complete workaholics for decades while still having time to have kids and a family, whereas women can't afford to do that if they want a family. They face an either/or choice that men don't to nearly the same degree.

Could a woman have come up with the general theory of relativity? Of course, no doubt in my mind. Was it more likely a man did? Yes.

Shenshen wrote: »

Would that include Ada Lovelace as well? I've always been fascinated by her, ever since I found out she pretty much invented software and coding.

There's some debate about that SS. Babbage had written up similar notes on what we might call coding for his difference/analytical engine well before they met. She was the first to publish them. What she certainly did do is consider the potential of this type of coding, something others including Babbage hadn't. And she was able and did condense it in "simple" terms. That's a helluva talent, right there.

As far as women in computing goes I'd rate someone like Grace Hopper far higher. There's another woman whose name sadly escapes who worked in the 1960's in NASA and who was a major trailblazer of computing and one of the very few front of house women engineers/programmers. There's the well known story of the African American women who worked in the background at NASA doing computation.

As an aside; mathematics was quite the popular subject for well heeled ladies in the 19th century. It was considered an "appropriate subject" for ladies. Ada Lovelace was one such lady. It remained a popular college subject and hobby up until the 1930's but then the uptake dropped right off a cliff. In the early days of personal computing there were more female faces as a percentage in the mix too. And it was at the hard coding coalface too. These days while quite the percentage of women are in the business, they tend not to be in the hardcore coding end, more the front end design stuff. It is odd to consider that in the days of "there there dear, make me a cup of tea" *pats arse* there were many more women at the sharp end of computing and doing maths than there are today where there's far more equality going on.

One woman that always fascinated me was Hedy Lamarr

Ms Lamarr. Having an oul brainstorm.


Hollywood actress was her main gig, but she was also an inventor. Howard Hughes(before he started peeing in jugs) being of the inventive sort himself was very taken with her mind and encouraged her and helped her with contacts in the aircraft and military industries. During the war she put her mind to coming up with different inventions to help the war effort(she even thought of jacking in the acting gig to join various think tanks. And they wanted her too). She came up with the idea of frequency hopping to make homing torpedoes un jammable. As you do. Frequency hopping has been used in all sorts of security applications since then. She was pretty much self taught too. And could speak a crap load of languages.

bluewolf wrote: »

It says katherine johnson got her degree at 18,serious minds both.
I think a lot of those nasa women did

Yep. It's easy to forget that the men and women who were working at the sharp end of 1960's NASA were on average mostly young people, barely out of college, well under 30.