It isn’t whataboutism, I’m not deflecting. What I’m alluding to is that there is some moral crusade these days about women’s historical achievements that seems to have veered into conspiracy theorist tier paranoia lately. Men weren’t rubbing their hands and twirling their mustaches and stealing women’s inventions to keep them down, there were just more classical gender role norms back then. We can certainly tut tut at the social pressure to stay at home with children back then and how that did prevent some women from inventing things, or how men didn’t take women seriously in industry because that wasn’t their role in the classical role setup, but this notion that men are or were somehow out to get women is silly.

If anything though I think the real problem is actually being inverted. At the time when women began pushing or being pushed into industry and academia, why did we value industry and academia over what the women were doing at the time? Caring for children seems pretty important, and outsourcing that to under-resourced strangers and in many cases foreigners as we do today is quite odd when you think about it.