Teach This Woman
Middle School+
Discussion Questions
- 1'That's Just Girl Talk' - Heezen saw Tharp's profiles of the rift valley and said they looked 'too much like continental drift.' He called it 'girl talk.' He was not uncertain - he was dismissive. What is the difference between saying 'I disagree with your evidence' and saying 'your evidence is not worth engaging with because of who you are'?
- 2Persistence and Proof - Tharp's first response to being dismissed was to redraw everything. She got the same result. She went back to Heezen. This happened more than once. What does it take to persist in the face of dismissal? Was her persistence the right strategy, or would something else have worked better?
- 3The Year That Changed - It took Heezen a year to accept Tharp's findings. What changed his mind was not her persistence alone - it was earthquake data that correlated precisely with her rift valley. What does this tell you about the relationship between individual conviction and external evidence? What would have happened if the earthquake data had not existed?
- 4Credit and Contribution - Tharp's name did not appear on the major papers on plate tectonics published between 1959 and 1963. Her profiles were the empirical foundation of the discovery. She was not on the ships, so she was not considered a field scientist. Who gets to be an author on a scientific paper, and how does that shape what gets credited as discovery?
- 5Being Recognized Late - Tharp received major recognition in 1997 and 2009. She was named one of the four greatest cartographers of the 20th century. Google Earth added a historical layer in her name. Is this recognition that comes too late, recognition that comes at the right time, or both?
Key Takeaways
- ◆1. Systematic Exclusion Produces Wrong Results - Tharp was not allowed on research ships. She worked from data gathered by someone else. And still, from a drafting table, she made the most significant geographic discovery of the 20th century. The system that excluded her was not protecting the quality of the science. It was limiting what the science could discover.
- ◆2. Dismissal Is a Form of Evidence - 'Girl talk' is not a scientific argument. But it is evidence of what Heezen thought about Tharp's work and about her. Understanding that dismissal is a form of evidence - that it tells you something about the person doing the dismissing - helps you read scientific disputes more carefully.
- ◆3. The Evidence Eventually Matters More Than the Dismissal - It took a year for Heezen to accept Tharp's findings, and what changed his mind was evidence he could not dismiss. The evidence eventually did the work. But it required someone who was willing to keep presenting it despite being dismissed.
- ◆4. Credit Systems Are Social Systems - Tharp was not on the papers about plate tectonics because she was not on the ships. The paper authorship rules were not explicitly discriminatory, but they produced a discriminatory result. Social systems can produce discriminatory outcomes without discriminatory intent.
- ◆5. What You Cannot See Can Still Be Mapped - Tharp mapped a forty-thousand-mile mountain range that no human had ever seen by working from sonar readings at a drafting table. Her tools were numbers, pencil, paper, and spatial reasoning. The largest geographic feature on Earth was invisible to direct observation and fully discoverable through data.
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