There were actually women scientists back in the day, but mostly they got the shaft. Take Maud Menton, the woman who discovered enzyme kinetics in 1913 as an example. She and a man named Leonor Michaelis were studying enzyme activity and while she was the one who came up with the formula for enzyme kinetics and figured out how to graph enzyme activity, he was the primary author on the paper. We know this because she was meticulous about keeping notes while he was a slob. Then there are Watson and Crick, the men who first postulated that the structure of DNA is a double helix. Except that there was a woman in their lab who happened to think of it first. Rosalyn Frankalin mentioned in a lab meeting that she thought DNA might be a double helix based on her studies using x-rays, and then all her notebooks happened to disappear. Unfortunately, she died before anybody could be awarded a Nobel Prize. She is starting to receive more credit now that Watson (or is it Crick?) is dead. Our professor likes to stress these points in class, and I'm glad.