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"The Matilda Effect": How Pioneering Women Scientists Have Been
Written Out of Science History

in Gender, History, Science | December 8th, 2025 1 Comment

        

[placeholder][Otto_Hahn_und_Lise_Meitner]

                                      Photo via Wikimedia Commons

The history of science, like most every history we learn, comes
to us as a procession of great, almost exclusively white, men,
unbroken but for the occasional token woman--well-deserving of her
honors but seemingly anomalous nonetheless. "If you believe the
history books," notes the Timeline series The Matilda Effect,
"science is a guy thing. Discoveries are made by men, which spur
further innovation by men, followed by acclaim and prizes for
men. But too often, there is an unsung woman genius who deserves just
as much credit" and who has been overshadowed by male colleagues
who grabbed the glory.

In 1993, Cornell University historian of science Margaret
Rossiter dubbed the denial of recognition to women scientists
"the Matilda effect," for suffragist and abolitionist Matilda
Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 essay "Woman as an Inventor" protested the
common assertion that "woman... possesses no inventive or
mechanical genius." Such assertions, Gage proceeded to
demonstrate, "are carelessly or ignorantly made... although
woman's scientific education has been grossly neglected, yet
some of the most important inventions of the world are due to her."

Over 100 years later, Rossiter's tenacious work in unearthing the
contributions of U.S. women scientists inspired the History of
Science Society to name a prestigious prize after her. The
Timeline series profiles a few of the women whom it describes as
prime examples of the Matilda effect, including Dr. Lise Meitner,
the Austrian-born physicist and pioneer of nuclear technology
who escaped the Nazis and became known in her time as "the Jewish
Mother of the Bomb," though she had nothing to do with the atomic
bomb. Instead, "Meitner led the research that ultimately
discovered nuclear fission." But Meitner would become "little
more than a footnote in the history of Nazi scientists and the
birth of the Atomic age."

Instead, Meitner's colleague Otto Hahn received the accolades, a
Nobel Prize in Chemistry and "renown as the discoverer of nuclear
fission. Meitner, who directed Hahn's most significant
experiments and calculated the energy release resulting from
fission, received a few essentialist headlines followed by
decades of obscurity." (See Meitner and Hahn in the photo above.)
Likewise, the name of Alice Augusta Ball has been "all but scrubbed
from the history of medicine," though it was Ball, an African
American chemist from Seattle, Washington, who pioneered what
became known as the Dean Method, a revolutionary treatment for
leprosy.

Ball conducted her research at the University of Hawaii, but she
tragically died at the age of 24, in what was likely a lab
accident, before the results could be published. Instead,
University President Dr. Arthur Dean, who had co-taught
chemistry classes with Ball, continued her work. But he failed
"to mention Ball's key contribution" despite protestations from
Dr. Harry Hollmann, a surgeon who worked with Ball on treating
leprosy patients. Dean claimed credit and published their work
under his name. Decades later, "the scant archival trail of Alice
Ball was rediscovered.... In 2000, a plaque was installed at the
University of Hawaii commemorating Ball's accomplishments."

Other women in the Matilda effect series include bacterial
geneticist Esther Lederberg, who made amazing discoveries in
genetics that won her husband a Nobel Prize; Irish astrophysicist
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the first radio pulsars in
1967, but was excluded from the Nobel awarded to her thesis
supervisor Antony Hewish and astronomer Martin Ryle. A similar
fate befell Dr. Rosalind Franklin, the chemist excluded from the
Nobel awarded to her colleagues James Watson, Francis Crick, and
Maurice Wilkins for the discovery of DNA.

These prominent examples are but the tip of the iceberg when it
comes to women who made significant contributions to
scientific history and were rewarded by being written out of
it and denied awards and recognition in their lifetime. For more
on the history of U.S. women in science and the social forces that
worked to exclude them, see Margaret Rossiter's three-volume Women
Scientists in America series: Struggles and Strategies to 1940,
Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972, and Forging a New World
since 1972. And read Timeline's Matilda Effect series of articles
here.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in
2018.

Related Content:

Read the "Don't Let the Bastards Get You Down" Letter That Albert
Einstein Sent to Marie Curie During a Time of Personal Crisis
(1911)

Women Scientists Launch a Database Featuring the Work of 9,000
Women Working in the Sciences

Marie Curie Attended a Secret, Underground "Flying University"
When Women Were Banned from Polish Universities

The Encyclopedia of Women Philosophers: A New Web Site Presents
the Contributions of Women Philosophers, from Ancient to Modern

Meet the Physicist Who Has Created 1600+ Wikipedia Entries for
Important Female & Minority Scientists

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. 


        

by OC | Permalink | Comments (1) |

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Comments (1)

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  * Jenny Jo says:
    December 9, 2025 at 8:24 am

    Great info. However on your Open Culture page displayed as I
    read this article you have Book Lists and eBook lists and
    Recordings lists- and you have such low representation of
    women authors I am shocked. Women were writing and publishing
    and contributing despite the blockade men put on them. Why
    don't you list them on those lists? Why have so many men when
    women are half the population? I love Open Culture but you
    contradict yourself by not addressing the continuation of
    the rigged game- only honoring men and their accomplishments
    and not sharing the work of women.

    Reply

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