Of all of Stern’s achievements, perhaps her most lasting legacy is in the modern technology of the Pap test. She collaborated with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Rosenthal, then the head cytopathologist at U.C.L.A, to apply NASA computer imaging technology to Pap screening. Stern developed a liquid-based sampling system to isolate and enrich the cervical epithelium, and helped define cellular criteria for computer programs. The work she did at JPL revolutionized Pap screening for cervical cancer, and her liquid-based sampling technique is still used in hospitals, laboratories, and clinics around the world.

Women were not allowed to attend meetings of any scientific society in Great Britain at the time, and none of the men who made their fame on thrilling the public with tales of the new find felt it necessary to mention Mary Anning in their discourses, a pattern of opportunistic neglect that would plague Anning’s work the rest of her life.

The Times had repeatedly editorialized that letting women vote would “derange” the social and political structure, that “the grant of suffrage to women is repugnant to instincts that strike their roots deep in the order of nature.” Moreover, one editorial said, suffragists tend to be “pacifists and enemies of preparedness.” “The men are doing the fighting,” the editorial said. “They should do the voting.”

It wasn’t that women were excluded from centers of learning, such as universities and scientific academies, and therefore never had a chance to contribute to the development of philosophy during this time in European history. On the contrary, as Kant’s discussion of Madame Du Châtelet indicates, they did in fact contribute a great deal.

The idea of sexual harassment itself might have been codified in law relatively recently, but the phenomenon has been around for a very long time. Ancient Rome had explicit laws against it: You weren't allowed to "accost, abduct or stalk" anybody, particularly women, if it was "contrary to good morals" (though, of course, this only was the case for upper class women). But explicit protections against sexual harassment, particularly for women at work, have historically been meager at best, or insulting at worst.

"In some ancient cemeteries as many as 37% of the armed dead were women."

This finding should make all archaeologists question previous identifications of the sex of Viking warriors.