[HN Gopher] "The Matilda Effect": Pioneering Women Scientists Wr...
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"The Matilda Effect": Pioneering Women Scientists Written Out of
Science History
Author : binning
Score : 86 points
Date : 2025-12-09 17:57 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openculture.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openculture.com)
| thayne wrote:
| Jocelyn Bell Burnell is an interesting case. She didn't get the
| nobel prize, but today she is generally the one given credit for
| discovering pulsars in astronomy textbooks.
| nearbuy wrote:
| Funny that Jocelyn Bell Burnell herself argued that she
| shouldn't have received the Nobel prize (I think she should
| have):
|
| > It has been suggested that I should have had a part in the
| Nobel Prize awarded to Tony Hewish for the discovery of
| pulsars. There are several comments that I would like to make
| on this: First, demarcation disputes between supervisor and
| student are always difficult, probably impossible to resolve.
| Secondly, it is the supervisor who has the final responsibility
| for the success or failure of the project. We hear of cases
| where a supervisor blames his student for a failure, but we
| know that it is largely the fault of the supervisor. It seems
| only fair to me that he should benefit from the successes, too.
| Thirdly, I believe it would demean Nobel Prizes if they were
| awarded to research students, except in very exceptional cases,
| and I do not believe this is one of them. Finally, I am not
| myself upset about it - after all, I am in good company, am I
| not!
| VinayUPrabhu wrote:
| https://vinayprabhu.substack.com/p/matilda-mars-and-markup-t... I
| had authored this last month
| IAmBroom wrote:
| Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46195205
| tptacek wrote:
| Not really; different submitter, almost no discussion.
| coredog64 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Franklin's name is a link to a paywalled Medium article. Found a
| copy expecting to see some nuanced discussion about the specific
| contributions she made, only to find that the missing bits were
| that they were mean to her about her lipstick and dress
| selection.
|
| Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but making the entire debate
| about her looks isn't doing anyone any favors.
| mandevil wrote:
| Rosalind Franklin would never have gotten a Nobel Prize. She
| died from cancer in 1958, three years before the Watson, Crick
| and Wilkins were awarded their prize, and Nobel was very clear
| that his award could not be awarded posthumously. Only ~three
| people have gotten posthumous awards, and all of them were
| alive on February 1st of the year they got the award.
|
| Wilkins (Franklin's boss) taking her data without her
| permission and sharing it with Watson and Crick so they could
| jump in at the end and analyze it faster than she did- and then
| not even put her name on the paper but Wilkins instead!- is
| truly classic academic evil. However, even if they had actually
| collaborated and Franklin's name had been on the paper, she
| would not have gotten a Nobel, due to the ovarian cancer that
| killed her at age 37.
| dekhn wrote:
| Her name is listed in the acknowledgements and she has a
| paper in the same issue as Watson&Crick. Also, there's
| evidence now that her data had already been shared in a
| departmental seminar when Wilkins shared it with Watson &
| Crick (I believe this is explained in detail in the Eighth
| Day of Creation, where the author did deep historical
| digging).
|
| I don't think she would have concluded that the structure of
| DNA was a double helix with antiparallel strands (that's the
| important bit).
| jrflowers wrote:
| > Maybe it's true, maybe it's not, but making the entire debate
| about her looks isn't doing anyone any favors.
|
| There isn't really much modern "debate" about Franklin's work,
| though her Wikipedia entry is much better than that particular
| article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin
| dwa3592 wrote:
| "In a full description of the structure in a paper submitted in
| August 1953 and published in 1954, Crick and Watson did attempt
| to set the record straight17. They acknowledged that, without
| Franklin's data, "the formulation of our structure would have
| been most unlikely, if not impossible", and implicitly referred
| to the MRC report as a "preliminary report" in which Franklin
| and Wilkins had "independently suggested that the basic
| structure of the paracrystalline [B] form is helical and
| contains two intertwined chains"."
|
| What Rosalind Franklin truly contributed to the discovery of
| DNA's structure -
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-01313-5
| fn-mote wrote:
| > Franklin's name is a link to a paywalled Medium article.
|
| I'm frustrated that in 2025, I am reading a dismissal of
| Franklin's contributions because someone has never heard of her
| and clicks on a link to Medium article to draw their
| conclusions. Wikipedia would be better. The 1950's was so long
| ago that there are (gasp) actual paper books on this history of
| the discovery of the double helix.
| tetris11 wrote:
| Emmy Noether is a good one
|
| > In April 1933, Noether received a notice from the Prussian
| Ministry for Sciences, Art, and Public Education which read: "On
| the basis of paragraph 3 of the Civil Service Code of 7 April
| 1933, I hereby withdraw from you the right to teach at the
| University of Gottingen."
|
| > Noether accepted the decision calmly, providing support for
| others during this difficult time. Hermann Weyl later wrote that
| "Emmy Noether - her courage, her frankness, her unconcern about
| her own fate, her conciliatory spirit - was in the midst of all
| the hatred and meanness, despair and sorrow surrounding us, a
| moral solace."
|
| > Typically, Noether remained focused on mathematics, gathering
| students in her apartment to discuss class field theory. When one
| of her students appeared in the uniform of the Nazi paramilitary
| organization Sturmabteilung (SA), she showed no sign of agitation
| and, reportedly, even laughed about it later.
| TitaRusell wrote:
| How much human resources have been lost because women were seen
| as stupid and intellectually inferior? How did people even come
| to this bizarre conclusion?
|
| Over the millennia many fathers secretly taught their little
| princesses to read and write. But apparently none of them wanted
| to upset the status quo.
| 6510 wrote:
| Normal people enforce things not one of them thinks about.
| There is nothing absurd enough for them to do. If you question
| it they revoke your membership.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Over the millennia many fathers secretly taught their little
| princesses to read and write. But apparently none of them
| wanted to upset the status quo.
|
| Apparently many of them did want to upset the status quo, or we
| wouldn't have the situation we are in now. Men gave women their
| rights and powers, without men deciding that nothing would
| change. Women pleaded men to make this change, but it was
| ultimately men who decided to give women these rights and that
| it is the right thing to do.
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