Reclaim HERstory
Jocelyn Bell Burnell wins $3 million prize for discovering pulsars - Ars Technica
In the mid‑1960s, as a new graduate student at Cambridge, Jocelyn Bell helped build a radio telescope by hand: 120 miles of wire and cable stretched across a four‑acre field. Once it was operating, she spent long days examining the telescope’s chart recordings, scanning for the subtle scintillation patterns her team hoped would reveal distant quasars. Amid the routine “bits of scruff” in the data, she eventually noticed something different: a signal that repeated with uncanny regularity. That tiny, rhythmic pulse would become the first recognized pulsar, a discovery that transformed astrophysics.
It was an object the world didn’t even have a name for yet but eventually became one of the most important astronomical discoveries of the 20th century. At the time, Burnell was only a student and so when it came time to award the Nobel Prize in 1974, it went to her male supervisor.
She didn't even get her name mentioned.
At the time, Jocelyn Bell Burnell didn’t protest. She said she was “just a student,” and that the prize was given “appropriately.”
As women, we endure a lifetime of being taught to be humble, to be grateful, to not make a fuss. We make ourselves smaller, quieter, and "less" for fear of being "too much." For Burnell, this was so deeply ingrained that even a world‑changing discovery didn’t feel like hers to claim, but truth tells a different story.
She built the telescope.
She read the data.
She recognized the signal no one else saw.
She discovered pulsars.
And yet the world wrote her out of her own breakthrough.
As women, we are often taught that humility is a virtue. This is a statement I agree with. Yes, we should be humble. We should acknowledge the contributions of others and appreciate everything that contributes to our achievements. But we can do that without putting ourselves in a cage. Humility should not be the reason our names disappear from the footnotes of our own achievements; humility is great until it becomes the silence that lets someone else’s story overwrite our own.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s discovery reminds me that taking credit isn’t arrogance, it’s accuracy. It’s preservation. It’s legacy‑building because when we don’t claim our work, the world learns the wrong lesson about who made what possible; the women who come after us deserve better than that.
In today's world when kids are asked to draw a picture of a scientist, they are more likely to draw a picture of a man. This is known as brilliance bias and was normal to me until I learned the true story: the word scientist was literally invented to describe a woman and yet nearly 200 years later our history has been rewritten so much that we've forgotten that truth. This month, Women’s History Month, let's return to the true stories that have shaped our lives.
As we honor the women of our past, I encourage you to think about the history you are creating right now. Name your contribution, stand in your brilliance and take up the space your work has earned because somewhere, a future woman is watching and learning what she’s allowed to become.
