Marie Tharp graduated from Ohio University in 1943 with bachelor's degrees in English and music. She also obtained four different minors. After her graduation, there was slightly more work availability for women due to the start of WWII. Tharp seized this opportunity and briefly worked for Standard Oil and Gas, though she found the work unsatisfying and left.

In 1948, Tharp was hired at the Lamont Geological Laboratory. Initially, her work was confined to general drafting and data pushing due to her gender. Women were not permitted to go into the field and collect data or hold any kind of leadership positions.

Tharp began mapping the ocean floor in 1949. For 18 years Tharp was contained to simply graphing data collected by her partner because she wasn’t allowed to board the ship and enter the field. In 1952, Tharp first detected the Mid-Atlantic rift and claimed it was evidence of a continental drift. She was ridiculed by her coworkers, including her partner of over 20 years. They taunted her and claimed her theory was just “girl talk.” It took over one year later for her coworkers to make the same scientific connections surrounding the continental drift theory that Tharp had made long before.

In 1977, extensive papers on plate tectonics and continental drift were published as an official scientific theory. Tharp’s name is never mentioned on these papers and she was denied credit for her theories.

Tharp’s story is important in a myriad of ways. Her life is an example of how women are shut out from the workforce, engendering the wage gap and other forms of workplace discrimination. It is questionable as to whether Tharp’s career would have been possible if she hadn’t graduated college during WWII.

The war created a labor shortage and the United States faced the possibility of another Great Depression. The government called upon women, previously shut out from work opportunities, to fill this ominous labor shortage. This phenomenon allowed for Marie Tharp to more easily enter a scientific field and gain workplace experience. Because of this experience, she was allotted a job in a geology laboratory which allowed her access to the environment and tools necessary for her studies. Yet this “access” was conditional. She still faced gender based discrimination that disallowed her the same, fully engaged, experiences as men in her field.

I would argue that these very obstacles experienced by Tharp are still present in our society today. Men are favored participants in hard sciences over women; men are also promoted more often leading to an even higher deficit of women on leadership positions. This kind of pushback against women through different levels of the workplace prevents women from reaching their full potential.

This oppressive cycle displays itself through the wage gap. Women are prevented from accessing the same opportunities as men, keeping the majority of them in low paying positions. Fewer women in leadership roles mean they don’t have the chance to earn the same amount of money as men. More than that, the few women who do achieve high-level positions in the workforce are paid significantly less than their male counterparts.

Unfortunately, if we examine this situation intersectionally it is evident that women of color experience even more discrimination compared to white women and have even fewer opportunities. This means the wage gap for women of color is even larger than that of white women in the work force.

Keeping this in mind, it is my belief that if Tharp was a woman of color she would not have had access to the same opportunities in her life that granted her the opportunity to make her discoveries. This begs the question; how many Marie Tharps has our society disallowed and hidden away?

Despite all she suffered through, all the discrimination she faced, Tharp made a momentous and extraordinary scientific discovery that has shaped the entire field of oceanography and geology. We must not only recognize Tharp’s accomplishments as a woman, but we must recognize what she went through in order to make these discoveries and pledge to do better, to learn from our mistakes and to allow more women to reach their potential as the next Marie Tharp.