Matilda effect Facts for Kids

Matilda effect

The Matilda effect is a bias against acknowledging the achievements of women scientists whose work is attributed to their male colleagues. This phenomenon was first described by suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–1898) in her essay, "Woman as Inventor" (first published as a tract in 1870 and in the North American Review in 1883). The term "Matilda effect" was coined in 1993 by science historian Margaret W. Rossiter.

Rossiter provides several examples of this effect. Trotula (Trota of Salerno), a 12th-century Italian woman physician, wrote books which, after her death, were attributed to male authors. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century cases illustrating the Matilda effect include those of Nettie Stevens, Lise Meitner, Marietta Blau, Rosalind Franklin, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

The Matilda effect was compared to the Matthew effect, whereby an eminent scientist often gets more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is shared or similar.

Examples

Examples of women subjected to the Matilda effect:

Theano of Crotone (6th century BCE) – early philosopher who did work in mathematics, but most of her work was overshadowed by or attributed to her husband, father, or teacher (depending on the source), Pythagoras.
Trotula (Trota of Salerno, 12th century) – Italian physician, author of works which, after her death, were attributed to male authors. Hostility toward women as teachers and healers led to denial of her very existence. At first her work was credited to her husband and son, but as information got passed on, monks confused her name for that of a man. She is not mentioned in the "Dictionary of Scientific Biography."
Jeanne Baret (1740–1807) – French botanist, first woman to have completed a circumnavigation of the globe. Partner and collaborator of the botanist Philibert Commerson, she joined the expedition of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville disguised as a man. They collected the first specimens of Bougainvillea. Most botanical discoveries have been attributed to Commerson alone, after whom about a hundred of species have been named. She was immortalized for the first much later with the description of Solanum baretiae [es] in 2012.
Nettie Stevens (1861–1912) – discoverer of the XY sex-determination system. Her crucial studies of mealworms revealed for the first time that an organism's sex is determined by its chromosomes rather than by environmental or other factors. Stevens greatly influenced the scientific community's transition to this new line of inquiry: Chromosomal sex determination. However, Thomas Hunt Morgan, a distinguished geneticist at the time, is generally credited with this discovery. Despite her extensive work in the field of genetics, Stevens' contributions to Morgan's work are often disregarded.
Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930) – Harvard University discovered that stimuli that were paired with other vivid stimuli would be recalled more easily. She also discovered that duration of exposure led to better recall. These findings, along with her paired-associations method, would later be used by G.E. Müller and E.B. Titchener, without any credit being given to Calkins.
Gerty Cori (1896–1957) – Nobel-laureate biochemist, worked for years as her husband's assistant, despite having equal qualification as him for a professorial position.
Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) – now recognized as an important contributor to the 1953 discovery of DNA structure. At the time of the discovery by Francis Crick and James Watson, for which the two men received a 1962 Nobel Prize, her work was not properly credited (though Watson described the crucial importance of her contribution, in his 1968 book The Double Helix).
Marthe Gautier (1925–2022) – now recognized for her important role in the discovery of the chromosomal abnormality that causes Down syndrome, a discovery previously attributed exclusively to Jérôme Lejeune.
In the late 1960s, Jocelyn Bell (born 1943) discovered the first radio pulsar. For this discovery, in 1974 a Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to her supervisor Antony Hewish and to Martin Ryle, citing Hewish and Ryle for their pioneering work in radio-astrophysics. Jocelyn Burnell was left out. At the time of her discovery, she was a Ph.D. student. She felt the intellectual effort had been mostly her supervisor's, but her omission from the Nobel Prize was criticized by several prominent astronomers, including Fred Hoyle.

Matilda effect facts for kids

Examples

See also