History. It's full of many things, Egyptians... war... Egyptians at war.
Look, I haven’t studied history since high school, okay?
Fortunately you needn’t have to, to know that history is also full of…
shit?
Well I was gonna say it’s full of ideas that women had that men get the credit for, but sure.
Take the Q-tip for example.
History would have you believe that the Q-tip was invented in 1923 by a Polish-American named Leo Gerstenzang.
Story goes though that he got the idea watching his wife stick cotton wads onto toothpicks to clean his kids’ ear.
So technically Mrs Gerstenzang came up with the idea.
And what does she get for it but mention on Qtips.com!
Yes, the history books are full of broads with bright ideas behind men with the means to make them happen.
And those ideas can form the basis of something as simple as the Qtip to something as complex as…
Yeah.
The commercial chicken industry - story goes - can be traced back a century to East Coast America.
And more specifically... to one giant cock up involving the wife of an egg-farmer.
In 1923 Mrs Cecile Steele was accidentally delivered five times the amount of chicks she’d ordered...
but instead of returning them, she housed them over winter and later sold them at a premium.
It was so profitable that she and Mr Steele stopped rearing chickens for eggs and started rearing them for their meat.
Old mate Cecile had just created the broiler industry now responsible for the torture of billions of chickens worldwide…
that is not the point.
Or maybe it is - how many more women out there aren’t getting the recognition they deserve for their role in global catastrophes?
A lot of people don’t know that in a manner of speaking a woman was actually behind the global financial crisis.
The global financial crisis. You can blame the global financial crisis on a woman?
So she’s actually a hero of mine but not for that reason I stress...so her name was Emilie Du Chatelet.
And she lived 400 years ago in France. She ran with the best of them.
She was a philosopher, a mathematician, a physicist and as it turned out….a prolific gambler.
She lost alotta money and couldn't immediately pay it back.
So she invented this system where she would pay the tax collectors.
A small amount of money for the rights to their future earnings and then used those rights to then pay off her gambling debts in the present.
And that’s exactly the concept behind financial derivatives.
And financial derivatives were actually a huge architect of the global financial crisis, so 300 years later Emily is still causing trouble.
But getting little credit...ahem.
Admittedly, derivatives have come a very long way since then...but it makes you think…
how many more women and their ideas are lost to...
I think it goes back to the fact that women just weren't taken seriously, they weren’t really allowed to publish in scientific journals...
there was no funding, all of that. And then of course there was just the problem of biology.
So you hear about all of these amazing female scientists and the story always seems to end with 'oh and then she died in childbirth.'
Hahahaha that old chestnut! Offspring or otherwise the struggle was real
I mean, how you meant to come up with ideas when it takes you so long to get near the institutions that promote them?
So even at the University of Sydney the first female physics PhD student was in 1973.
What? The first female PhD student, in physics, happened in the 70s?
Yep.
Wow...that's embarrassing.
Ah yeees! But see having ideas is one thing - realising them is another.
Take Monopoly, for example.
History tells us...
Monopoly was invented by a man named Charles Darrow in 1933.
WRONG! It was invented by a woman named Elizabeth Magie in 1904. And did she pass Go?
No.
Did she get 200 dollars?
She collected 500 dollars.
Literally! In 1904 hectic leftie femmo Liz Magie created this.
In 1933 Charles Darrow “created” (I use the term loosely) this.
Hmmm...her's was called The Landlord’s Game - it critiqued capitalism!
His was called Monopoly - it celebrated it.
Which made it all the more hilarious that Liz Magie was reportedly bought out for 500 dollars…
While Charles “I totally nicked your idea” Darrow became the first millionaire game designer in history.
Now, Liz patented her game in 1904 but at the time less than 1 per cent of all patent applicants (not holders) were women.
So it likely would’ve been a nice, cool swim upstream.
So if a woman rolled up to a patent office and said 'hey I’ve invented a thing', it’s a lot less likely that she’ll be taken seriously.
It’s a lot less likely that she’ll get a meeting and it’s also a lot less likely that she’ll be able to negotiate well for herself...
because women even now we’re not taught well how to stand up for ourselves.
Sure... but a lot has changed in a hundred years. For one, a lot more women walk these halls...
And more female inventors hold patents...and if current trends continue they’ll reach patent parity in 2092… so that’s...
shit.
Well it’s something isn’t it?
The future’s brightER ok, but we wanna shine a light here on the past.
So here’s to the legend ladies behind the lauded lads.
2092...honestly.