Feynman, 1966 (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fotuva.org&#x2F;feynman&#x2F;what_is_science.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fotuva.org&#x2F;feynman&#x2F;what_is_science.html</a>):<p><i>&gt; I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up--that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line--a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn&#x27;t realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.<p>She went on and said, &quot;Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart,&quot; etc.--I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson: The female mind is capable of understanding analytic geometry. Those people who have for years been insisting (in the face of all obvious evidence to the contrary) that the male and female are equally capable of rational thought may have something. The difficulty may just be that we have never yet discovered a way to communicate with the female mind. If it is done in the right way, you may be able to get something out of it.</i><p>That&#x27;s almost 60 years ago that he went on record saying that pedagogical issues may be affecting women in mathematics and he had lost faith in the assumption of their inferiority.  This wasn&#x27;t just anybody saying this and this wasn&#x27;t just any physicist saying this - this was <i>Feynman</i>.  This was the guy the other physicists looked at in awe and it was the year after he won his Nobel Prize for Quantum Electrodynamics.  Few physicists have ever earned so much respect from their peers.<p>If that&#x27;s not convicing then read how he was the one who encouraged his sister Joan to pursue science against the wishes of their mother who thought women lacked the cranial capacity to do science. (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aas.org&#x2F;cswa&#x2F;status&#x2F;2003&#x2F;JANUARY2003&#x2F;MyMotherTheScientist.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aas.org&#x2F;cswa&#x2F;status&#x2F;2003&#x2F;JANUARY2003&#x2F;MyMotherTheS...</a>)<p><i>&gt; It wasn’t until her 14th birthday—March 31, 1942—
that her notion of becoming a scientist was revived. Richard presented her with a book called
Astronomy. “It was a college textbook. I’d start reading it, get stuck, and then start over again.
This went on for months, but I kept at it. When I reached page 407, I came across a graph that
changed my life.” My mother shuts her eyes and recites from memory: “‘Relative strengths of the
Mg+ absorption line at 4,481 angstroms . . . from Stellar Atmospheres by Cecilia Payne.’ Cecilia
Payne! It was scientific proof that a woman was capable of writing a book that, in turn, was quoted
in a text. The secret was out, you see.”</i><p>Richard was 23 or 24 when he gave her that book.  Keep in mind this was the 1940&#x27;s and it was the same year he received his PhD - so he wasn&#x27;t just a kid and supporting women in science wasn&#x27;t the popularity contest it is today.  When 24 years later he made the other quote in 1966 he knew women were capable scientists because his sister had already become one.<p>This is all to say that before you take one chapter from one book out of context and extrapolate across his entire life make sure you get a few more data points to see if the extrapolation makes any sense.