Marie Curie, frankly, is not a very important physicist. She gets more press than she deserves for two reasons: 1) she was French at a time when France was dominating science and math and 2) she's a woman, and women are rare in the field.
There are other posts on this thread detailing why this is so. Women are less likely to be geniuses than men. That cuts them off of the top end. They are far less likely than men to be mathematical geniuses. That cuts them out of mathematics, physics, and a good bit of the hard sciences and engineering.
For every Marie Curie there are a hundred Pierre Curies. That's the fact.
Pretending that this isn't true is nonsense and needs to stop. The Chinese are not doing this. They promote on the basis of meritocracy, not an insistence that there be 50% females in a field that they a) aren't interested in for the most part and b) aren't competitive in when they are.
We ought to have no barriers to great theoreticians like Amy Noether (a much more imprtant contributor than Marie Curie) or fine experimentalists like Curie. But we should not kid ourselves that there is a gender equality of talent in this field. There isn't.
Thank you. And that is fact. If a woman wants to do it, fine, but let’s not kid ourselves here.
And there is a lot of similar human inventory data that one must never dare mention in polite company.
>Marie Curie, frankly, is not a very important physicist. She gets more press than she deserves for two reasons: 1) she was French at a time when France was dominating science and math and 2) she’s a woman, and women are rare in the field.<
There is another factor that very few people know. She herself admitted that her husband, Pierre, did a tremendous amount of the work that brought fame to Marie Curie.
This is not mentioned because all the feminists would have a cow. The trouble with Western Civilization is that women have cowed its men.