HAVE you ever wondered why there are not more female inventors? Why not more women like the remarkable Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood actress who co-invented (with a man) a secret communications system based on work done by her husband (whom she divorced)?

Hedy Lamarr, both sexy and inventive, nurtured her idea for decades.

The reason is less obvious than you may think. It has little to do with the copiously documented superiority of men in mechanical skills and their competitiveness. It also has little to do with the fact that women have been busy taking care of inventors and giving birth to and raising inventors.

The real reason is that for far too long people have been comparing the ideas of inventors to “light bulbs.” This persistent metaphor has discouraged women, whose ideas are more like seeds — not light bulbs. There’s a huge difference, as you know, between a “light bulb” and “a seed.” One takes genius; the other involves lots of care. Male inventors were simply switching on bulbs — and that was pretty easy. Words kill. The wrong words kill the ideas and initiative of invisible inventors.

Thomas Edison had the ultimate “light bulb” idea

The New York Times reports:

Researchers found that we find an idea more or less exceptional depending on the metaphors used to describe it. And not just that: Those metaphors had different effects depending on the gender of the idea’s creator.

[…]

Kristen Elmore, a developmental and social psychologist at Cornell University and lead author of the study, saw metaphors about ideas everywhere. She saw light bulbs on bulletin boards at schools and in student essays about inventions. Less frequently, young people were exposed to metaphors that describe nurturing ideas like seedlings.

Dr. Elmore and her colleague, Myra Luna-Lucero, a researcher at Columbia Teachers College, set out to study whether these metaphors carry unexplored implications. In a series of three experiments, more than 700 adult men and women, mostly in their 30s, were exposed to a variety of male and female inventors whose ideas were described as emerging like light bulbs or nurtured seedlings.

They found that people tend to rate discoveries that came about “like a light bulb” as more exceptional than those that are “nurtured like seeds.” But not when the inventor was a woman. In that case, people rated “nurtured” ideas as more exceptional.

Ann Fink, a neuroscientist and feminist biology fellow at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, says their study supports emerging evidence that harassment,discrimination and unconscious bias discourage women from breaking into male-dominated fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. The study, she said, shows that implicit associations affect how people judge someone’s competence in the sciences — in this case, genius.

I will say this to Dr. Fink, Dr. Elmore and Ms. Luna-Lucero, who are doing so much to uncover scientific history: We can all do our part to help more women become inventors.

First and foremost, don’t let ideas pop into your head like light bulbs.

If an idea does go off in the head of a man — like a light bulb — he should be denied grants to help develop this idea. He should go back to the lab and nurture it for a decade or so, like a seed. And then the world can give it a chance. If on the other hand, an ambitious female scientist has an idea, we can be sure it is a seed — and give her lots of money right off the bat. Title IX should have a provision against “light bulbs.”

The other possible remedy is to ban light bulbs altogether. This might prevent people from using this disturbing metaphor. We can go back to candlelight under President Hillary. Besides, the light bulb was a light bulb in the mind of a man.

In the meantime, when anyone ever says there have not been many female inventors, please remember the remarkable Hedy Lamarr (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler), who patented her work long before there were generous, government grants for those studying the obstacles to female invention.

Ideas, by the way, are not so much “nurtured” as developed. Human beings are nurtured. Women have nothing to be ashamed of for having nurtured human beings and not produced many inventions.

— Comments —

Laura writes:

Here are interesting tidbits about Hedwig Keisler which help explain why our famous inventor is so admired by The New York Times:

In early 1933, at age 18, she starred in Gustav Machatý‘s film,Ecstasy (Ekstase in German, Extase in Czech), which was filmed in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Lamarr’s role was that of a neglected young wife married to an indifferent older man. The film became notorious for showing Lamarr’s face in the throes of orgasm as well as close-up and brief nude scenes in which she is seen swimming and running through the woods.^[2][11]

It age 18 on 10 August 1933, Lamarr married Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy (he was reputed to be the third richest man in Austria) and extremely jealous Austrian military arms merchant and munitions manufacturer. He strongly objected to her simulated orgasm scene in Ecstasy. In her autobiography Ecstasy and Me, Lamarr described Mandl as extremely controlling, preventing her from pursuing her acting career and keeping her a virtual prisoner, confined to their castle home, Schloss Schwarzenau. Mandl had close social and business ties to the fascist government of Italy, selling munitions to Mussolini;^[9] and, although he was half-Jewish, had ties to the Nazi government of Germany as well. Lamarr wrote that Mussolini and Hitler had attended lavish parties hosted at the Mandl home. He had her accompany him to business meetings, where he conferred with scientists and other professionals involved in military technology. These conferences were her introduction to the field of applied science and the ground that nurtured her latent talent in science.^[12]

Lamarr’s marriage to Mandl eventually became unbearable, and she decided to separate herself from both him and her country. She wrote in her autobiography that she disguised herself as her maid and fled to Paris. However, rumors claimed that Lamarr persuaded Mandl to let her wear all of her jewelry for a dinner, then disappeared.^[13]

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