WTF!?!

[stellar_muddle]

Astronomy, for example, was dominated (at least in numbers of those doing the actual work) by women in the early modern era, until the male astronomers decided that they could get the respect they wanted by making astronomy more like physics and proclaiming it to be too difficult for women.


(From a discussion on the respect shown women vs men in physics)

You could do the research to check the first part of that statement wrt stats - I suspect that you may get more women involved in the the classification and cataloging eg the Modern History section of the History of Astronomy and the links therein (but that is Wikipedia and not proof/evidence).

But the second bit...? I'd ask the poster, but while I can possibly frame a polite way of asking for references for the first bit, the second half is a bit less clear. I would have though the traditional glass ceiling/discouragement of women in the sciences historically would have been more applicable rather than such a transition for such given reasoning.

Curiously the same poster then implies that the proportions of females in astonomy are larger than those for physics generally because they can name historical female astronomers, "making it tougher to tell young women that they won't be able to hack it."

I'm confused.

And wandered out at noon but couldn't see the comet, even with binoculars - too much ambiant haze/scattered light from the sun, even with the sun as high as possible.