Academic credit Memes

The meme brilliantly captures the historical struggle of women scientists like Chien-Shiung Wu, who performed the crucial experiment disproving the conservation of parity but watched two male colleagues win the Nobel Prize for the theory instead. That wide-eyed, shocked Squidward face is basically every female scientist throughout history watching their work get Columbus'd by male colleagues. Wu's experiment literally changed our understanding of physics, yet she got the scientific equivalent of "thanks for the help, sweetie." The scientific community's history of overlooking women's contributions is so consistent it could qualify as its own natural law—Newton's Fourth Law: Female Achievement Tends to Remain Uncredited Unless Acted Upon by Massive Public Outrage.