You have never heard of Hertha Ayrton. She was a brilliant British engineer, physicist, and inventor at the turn of the 20th century, and if you knew who she was you would thank her for steadying the flicker then prevalent in movie projection systems (why they’re still called flicks). But in her lifetime, Ayrton was also a prominent suffragist and an outspoken advocate for the acceptance of women in scientific fields. Ayrton wanted to make sure due recognition went to another brilliant physicist: her friend Marie Curie.

See? It worked. And now, 92 years after Ayrton’s death and 81 years after Curie’s, we can see the real problem with Ayrton’s success. Because today if you ask someone to name a woman scientist, the first and only name they’ll offer is Marie Curie. It’s one of the biggest obstacles to better representation of women in science and technology, and it’s time to cut it out. Stop talking about Marie Curie; she wouldn’t have wanted things this way.

When Silvia Tomášková, director of the Women in Science program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, brings up famous female scientists with her students—and this has been happening since she started teaching 20 years ago—she gets the same reaction: “Marie Curie.” Tomášková always tries to move them on. “Let’s not even start there. Who else?” What about Vera Rubin, who confirmed the existence of dark matter? The experimental physicist Chien-Shiung Wu? Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood starlet who invented a communications technology that paved the way for Wi-Fi, GPS, and Bluetooth?