This is actually a bit of a low blow I think. In almost every textbook/science class, practically every major scientist mentioned is male. This is because almost every major scientific advance/discovery throughout history has been done by a man (with the notable exception of Curie and a few others). The reasons for this would make a good post in and of itself, obviously, because it is a good example of institutionalized sexism.

A ruler (or book or course, as I have seen all three) highlighting WOMEN scientists is not simply trying to present men as the neutral and women as a sub-category. The fact is that, within the history of science, women ARE a sub-category. This is an attempt to bring women's contributions to the forefront and draw attention to the fact that there have been many major and influential scientists in history, even though they may typically be glossed over.

This is not the same situation as something unisex vs. women's clothing, as you seem to be suggesting.

Barbara McClintock (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock) is on the Rulers of Science ruler, sooo.... two, yay.

For the Rulers of Science, I see: Archimedes, Zhang Heng (?), Muhammed Ibn...?, Copernicus, Galileo, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, Isaac Newton, Fahrenheit, Benjamin Franklin, Linnaeus, Alessandro Volta, André-Marie Ampère, Louis Daguerre, Samuel Morse, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, Louis Pasteur, Alfred Nobel, Alexander Graham Bell, Edison, Pavlov, Marie Curie, Marconi, Einstein, Barbara McClintock.

The women rulers are harder to make out... Hypatia of Alexandria, Maria Agnesi, Caroline Hershchel, Miranda Stuart (!), mathematician Ana/Aria C... of L..., Elizabeth Blackwell, A... C..., Marie Curie, Florence S...., [illegible], [illegible], Anna Freud, Gerty Cori, I.. J..-C..., Rachel Brown, Margaret Mitchell, Barbara McClintock, Maria Goeppert-Mayer, [illegible] computer?, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Dorothy Hodgkin, Gertrude Elion, Rosalind Franklin, Jane Goodall.

Sadly, this is true for every field: female filmmaker, female doctor, female athlete, female author, female lawyer, female blah blah blah. Cos apparently when females go beyond the "pink collar" work industry, it's like "WOW!!! SHE'S SO SMART/TALENTED/STRONG, SHE'S ACTUALLY A DOCTOR/LAWYER/FILMMAKER/WRITER/WHATEVER."

I have to disagree on this one. The Ruler of Science has both male and female names on it, so it cannot be called the Men Rulers of Science, even if it is majority male. Well...the Great Scientists (as recognized in popular culture and discourse about the history of science) were mostly male. The Great Women Rulers of Science is in this context an attempt to highlight undermentioned women scientists, who have been doing badass things for a while.

Thank you so much for posting this! When I first saw this over on Neatorama, I first tried to get a fuller image to see if I could spot women on both rulers. Unfortunately my computer wasn't loading the images well, so I couldn't really tell. I ultimately decided that it didn't really matter. If women were on both rulers, there shouldn't need to be a separate one for women, and if they weren't, then obviously that's a problem in and of itself. I left a comment on Neatorama simply stating that it was interesting that there was a separate ruler for women.

If there are enough note-worthy women if science (*sigh*) to fill en entire ruler, then why not just split the groups evenly and have them both on one ruler? I think that not long ago I would've thought "Cool, they are acknowledging the work those women did!". Now I just think "If those women are so awesome, why do they have to be separate?"

The point is that women scientists have been separated off as though they're some kind of footnote to the 'real' great scientists of history. There may be less female scientists for whatever reasons, but that's not the point. There are obviously plenty of great scientists in history who are female, enough for their own ruler in fact! So why not just include them on the 'great scientists ruler' rather than single them out as though their sex makes them some kind of an afterthought? Surely they could have just gotten a longer ruler?

So men rule the rulers.

This is tangentially related, but I was kind of surprised: I'm a bartender, and when I start tabs for people, I usually write on their slip a short description of what they're wearing so that I recognize who is who quickly. The other night I opened one tab for a man and described him as 'stripes,' and then opened another tab for a woman and described her as 'girl in blue' - the difference being that I didn't note that the first tab was a guy at all, that I assume anything not labeled otherwise to be male. It's something I always do but never noticed. It's really small, but it was odd to catch it in myself. That system really gets inside your head.

The main objection being raised in the comments seems to be that female scientists' accomplishments are less important than those made by the male scientists listed on the default ruler, and that it's THIS situation that is actually guiding scientist-choice on that ruler instead of whatever else might be at play. It seems to me, though, that there's a way to get around that idea and still be inclusive of women (you know, without creating this mostly male 'Rulers of Science' and then the specialized 'Great Women Rulers of Science')-- just expand and reorder the 'Rulers of Science' set of individuals to include both men and women and relabel them 'Rulers of Science' and 'MORE Rulers of Science' or something to that effect without segregating the groups into male/female form as it mostly is now. It isn't like the default ruler is organized in ranked form-- it isn't declaring Archimedes #1 and then Zhang Heng #2 and so on. Since it seems to actually be in chronological order, they would probably still run into a male-heavy ruler on the one including the earlier scientists, but perhaps the reason for this could be made clear by labelling the rulers instead something like "Rulers of Science: Antiquity - X" and "Rulers of Science: X - Present", which might help avoid the situation that we have at present in which women are presented as the other or lesser (which the 'MORE' suggestion doesn't entirely avoid).

Bottom line, I guess, for the TLDR crowd-- the designers had more choices than producing the default ruler + female ruler or just producing the default ruler without including more women. That they didn't explore any of those other choices is kind of problematic.

I agree with the commenter above, this is ridiculous. This company went out of their way to highlight the achievements of women in science, and based on a fuzzy unclear picture you are quibbling about the fact that there don't seem to be as many women on the "great scientists" list. Fact is, women are still much less likely than men to go into the natural sciences, and historically many great achievements have been made by men. The problem is that women are not encouraged to go into science, and that in past years were prevented from doing so, that the structure of scientific careers seems to be incompatible with a work-life balance, not that a ruler company is pointing out that there have been a lot of women who have had great scientific achievements. If anything they should be applauded for promoting women in science as role models for young women interested in the natural sciences.

It's things like this that make people dismiss feminists as frivolous (and I saw this as a sociology prof who does feminist research on gender, and hear things like this cited as examples of feminist's irrelevancy all the time by people trying to argue with me that we don't need feminism anymore).

If you want an image that actually matters to the lives of women, why not the graphic released by the census today that shows the earnings ratio of men to women over time, which shows that women are still earning 77 cents to men's dollar?

@ Fannie

You said "Ever read anything by Paul Elam? If not, google his name and read some of his pontifications on how the superiority of men is demonstrated by the great achievements that have been accomplished by men (as opposed to women)."

Funny, I have written a great deal on gender politics,and from a decidedly male perspective, but do not recall having ever written anything that claims male superiority or anything close to it, and that would make sense, since I don't beleive men are superior to women.

Most of my stuff is online. Perhaps you could just link everyone to your support for this statement rather than ask them to Google me and hunt it down?

Here's a crazy idea!

How about they take ALL the great scientists they want to highlight, of any gender, and then create several DIFFERENT "rulers of science" rulers and put different people on each ruler --say, divide the women between them so each highlights both men AND women, then slap COLLECT THEM ALL on the packaging? Tadah, it's marketable AND less sexist!!

Maybe someone reading this might have some useful insights on this question, related to the subject of the post. I write about the history of engineering (and am female, and an engineer)--while doing a paper on the diaspora of British railway engineers in the late 19th century I ran across one line in the obituary of a British engineer who had worked in India:

'In connection with this undertaking mention should be made of the courage of the widow of Mr. Solomon Tredwell, the Contractor, who, after his too early decease, determined, for the honour of her husband's name, to continue the works, and with the efficient aid of Mr. Clowser and Mr. Adamson, did complete them most satisfactorily.'

My question is, does Alice Tredwell deserve more notice than one line in someone else's obituary? On the one hand, why should she get more? She's doing what a lot of men did who get little or no mention in the history books; also, why should her accomplishment be considered 'odd' or special, different from other women who do equally difficult and challenging things (including engineering; Emily Roebling and Julia Morgan come to mind)? On the other hand, the invisibility of the myriad Alice Tredwells of the world is what permits people like a few of the commenters here to say things like 'women have never been engineers' or 'women have never contributed to the engineering community'. A friend of mine said 'she at least needs to be foregrounded in order to challenge the stereotype, but how do we do that without encouraging a notion of her 'oddness' ?' Another friend wrote, when I addressed a similar subject on my blog, 'As long as we all are still expected to marvel at female scientists or astronauts or construction workers, we're not equal yet.'

In any sample of 25 out of many thousands, someone is going to feel left out. Probably, I would have made a different selection of the greatest scientists (where are Maxwell, Gauss, Euler, Fleming?), but they would have been mostly men.

But that's just because throught history, female scientists have been the exception. They (men) didn't let them do science, they didn't think they were smart enough, they thought they should be doing other things. Of the few brave ones who dared to challenge them and do science, some had to sign their works under a fake man's name, or their husband's, or had their work stolen by their mentors, colleagues, etc. You may not like it. It may make you angry. But you can't change it.

You can't have, yet, a selection of the greatest scientists in history were half ot them are men and half women. It would be a selection of great scientists, no doubt about it, but not the greatest.

The MRA troll has been googling himself and stumbled here. Now he's going to enlighten us all. Just a quick scan of his bio tells you all you need to know about the axe he's grinding. The whining is deafening over at his place. With luck it won't catch on here.

Wow, Max, whatever you fear may "catch on" here, I would not let it trouble you. Judging by the nature of your insulting and childish response to a simple and respectful post, there are already troubles aplenty here.

I think a ruler of mixed men and women who have influenced science in the last fifty years would be fantastic. As a kid, it might teach them the name of someone they've not heard of, perhaps encouraging a wikipedia exploration.

All the argument about how important someone's scientific contribution was is ridiculous. Who cares about the import of someone discovering one thing vs. another? Sometimes a small discovery leads to a big one - but does that overshadow the import of the work that came before?

I think that -- if Gwen were to be taking the same point of view with this product as she did in her "Baby Care Products for Dad" entry, she would have written about the "Rulers of Science" product as something more like:

The Rulers of Science is another example of feminizing traditionally masculine activities, much like attempts to market other science products to girls (for instance, the science kits for girls). And it connects female achievement to to science, which many of the women I know entirely lack and find rather intimidating, if not outright terrifying.

But it’s also clearly presenting women as competent scientists who can do science and who reap rewards from doing so. The “Great Rulers of Science” on the ruler includes female scientists; it implies that women are capable of doing science. It presents scions of science not as a history of only white male exclusion, but as individuals each “standing on the shoulders of giants.”

And you know…I think that’s kinda awesome.

Of course, that smacks of sexism, but all I did was change the gender references from male to female (and vice versa) and changed the references to baby-care for science.

Gwen's presentation a month ago was that making a product for a gender that relates to something traditionally and strongly associated with the other gender by trying to make it appeal to the positives for that person (rather than the traditionally and culturally held negatives) was "kinda awesome". Even with something that was a minor forward step. A month later, I'm not seeing the inclusion of women on the "Rulers of Science" as being presented as "kinda awesome". I mean, the statement the comes the closest to "kinda awesome" (although at a far stretch) is:

I’ll give the company credit for trying to create a product that highlights women’s contributions to scientific discovery, only one of which would apparently be considered important enough to get a mention if we didn’t get a whole ruler all to ourselves.

Yes, I understand that praising the addition of two female scientists to a list of the "Rulers" of science (whatever the hell that means anyway) wasn't the point of the post. However, at least to my eyes, you haven't presented an intellectually honest standard between the post of 16 August and the post of 16 September.

(That you also hint at an understanding of motive by the manufacturer in the sentence above is also intellectually problematic, but that's another point altogether, and maybe I'm reading too much into the "would apparently" portion of your statement.)

In case you haven’t yet seen enough evidence that men are treated as the neutral category, and women as a sub-category,

I've seen more than enough to believe it, probably more based on my own experience rather than reading this blog, but I would be interested to see some more solid evidence.

Posts like these provide a good illustration of the men as neutral treatment, but because the items they look at have been selected to be good illustrations they don't seem to provide solid evidence. They're anecdotal.

I'd be interested to see links to some studies where people have looked for this result in a more systematic way, and reported the cases where they found men treated as neutral but also reported cases where they found no gender treated as neutral and cases with women treated as neutral, if that's been done. Possibly those links have already been given in an earlier post.

Firstly, men and women have never been and never will be equal. Neither are any two men or women for that matter. Why women need to perpetually argue and demand they be recognized as more is beyond rational thinking. Insofar as the datum of this debate predicated on the choice(s) of a corporation to sell product is laughable. Don't like it don't buy it the corporation will adjust to ensure future sales. But you are never satisfied and the zeal for unilateral propaganda continues to spread like mortal cancer that is only good for the host which invades the whole body!

My personal opinion is it should have been Nikola Tesla pictured on that ruler who has contributed scientifically to our current way of life more than any other scientist or scientists combined!!! The next time you use anything that works by electricity thank Tesla. Also when you use your cell phone, remote control, radio, tv, microwave, MRI, fluorescent tube, neon light, x-ray, electric motor, computer, laptop, telephone and a myriad of other modern devices think of Tesla. Then consider those inventions which were stolen from him when he died. This would include the Tesla Car that used natural electric fields form the earth to power a car without the need for fuel or a battery! Distributing electricity anywhere on the planet without wires for free! A way to flex or oscillate the atmosphere! Etc.

So here you have a male, Tesla, who does not appear in schools and does not get the more than deserved recognition as Einstein gets! Does that make Tesla a sub category scientist? NO! Consider and try to contemplate what it may have taken for anyone to conceptualize the mechanics of the polyphase motor from nothing. This could only be the inspirational thinking of a pure genius over 100 years ago, without the aid of computers and such tools which men and women use today that would have been all done by hand!!! Like it or not our current advances are on the shoulders of scientists from the past who make it possible for us to do research that is child’s play in comparison to their scientific environment! That they were male or female is purely inconsequential. It is what it is, that is, what it was!

While I digressed a little showing an example of inequality and lack of correct recognition even between men, in the realm of scientific minds, I will come back to the moot point and the egregiousness of the author of this piece. In order for anyone to be recognized in the scientific world as contributors to science it can only be achieved by HARD work and a lot of sacrifice! Not by being treated with a handicap to gain notoriety! Certainly not based on gender alone! To gain entry into the group, Rulers of Science, has nothing to do with being a man or woman, but everything to do with your mental capacity to do so. So if that is where you want to be, get to work and be prepared to sacrifice your whole life for that is what those men did! Question is, do you have the discipline to do that?

Women should be ashamed of what they have done in order to rise, be it in the world of science, education or in a social setting. They do this at the expense of others not at their own expense! Even my children who happen to be boys are discriminated against and their chance at learning and education grossly hindered as schools are now geared to accommodate females and their way of thinking and learning. I have been at the schools and clearly saw that the mostly female teachers favour girls over boys when teaching! Consequently boys are dropping out of school at an alarming rate because they are unable to function as boys were not created to think like women nor should they be expected and forced to! Women have more rights than a city with only one way streets and no left hand turns! But they are NEVER satisfied!

I have a question to ask to which I have NEVER received an answer. What good has feminism bestowed on our cumulative society that has benefited men and women equally? Think hard and give me one decent example and I will frame it!

Respectfully,
Attila L. Vinczer

Ladies, your degrees are in sociology...which is next to useless.

If you want to be respected, you should have studied the natural sciences.

@Fannie,

You still didn't address Paul's point, you evaded it. Women CHOOSE the liberal arts, and do not go into the hard sciences. There is no one barring them from doing so. The Arts are fine, but it is...useless.

Now I'm confused! I though the whole point of a "Great Women Rulers of Science" would be to encourage more girls to take up science. It would also presumably help men and women better understand that women scientists have made some great advances.
But no! it is all a sinister plot to demonstrate that men are the neutral position for scientists.
There should be a UN committee overseeing the production of commemorative rulers.

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