Despite advances in education and career achievements, the invisibility of the achievements of women in science continues.  The Francis Crick Institute in London, for example, cost an estimated £700 million to build and equip, and has running costs of £140 million a year, but while it was being constructed it required a £1 marker pen to correct an information board on the perimeter of the building site to acknowledge the role that Rosalind Franklin played in Crick’s work.

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OK, so it was the 1950’s and maybe they knew no better, but then twenty years later Jocelyn Bell Burnell suffered, as so many do, at the hands of her PhD supervisor – succinctly described here on a display panel in Belfast City Hall celebrating the good and the great of Belfast.

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At least Katherine Johnson has, during the last twenty years,  received appropriate recognition for her contribution to the work of NASA during the 1960s and 1970s.

U.S. President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to NASA mathematician Katherine G. Johnson during an event in the East Room of the White House in Washington
U.S. President Barack Obama presents the Presidential Medal of Freedom to NASA mathematician Katherine G. Johnson during an event in the East Room of the White House in Washington November 24, 2015. Johnson is a pioneer in American space history. REUTERS/Carlos Barria