It was hardly the last act of sexism she’d encounter. By the late 1930s she was Germany’s first female professor of physics. Yet when she fled to Sweden to escape the Nazis, the scientist running the Stockholm lab where she settled refused to give her equipment or her own set of keys, and paid her an assistant’s salary.

Her exile also allowed Hahn to conveniently omit her name from the nuclear fission research for which he was awarded a Nobel Prize, alone, in 1944.

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