When Vera Rubin arrived at Palomar Observatory in 1965, they told her she couldn’t stay.
“We don’t have a ladies’ room,” they said.
So she cut out a paper skirt, taped it over the little stick man on the bathroom door, and replied:
“There. Now you do.”
Then she walked in—and stayed in astronomy until the day she retired in 2014.
That was Vera Rubin: sharp, steady, and unstoppable.
Princeton refused her for grad school because she was a woman.
Her work? It shattered everything we thought we knew about space when Vera discovered dark matter.
“Don’t let anyone keep you down for silly reasons like who you are,” she once said.