Ever wonder why we have learned about all of these genius MALE scientists and mathematicians in our classrooms?
Or why so many of the same people seem to have discovered everything?
The reason is the Matilda effect and to a lesser extent the Matthew effect.
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| Source: Wikipedia |
Historically women were discouraged from education and it was especially believed that Math and Science were not fields suited to women. That didn't stop women from wanting to study math and science (if it were me it would make me wonder what was so special and want to prove them wrong).
Women who studied math and science were called witches and often killed for their work... if you don't know the story of Hypatia you should google her.
Even after women were "allowed" to study and research at Universities the men they worked alongside received the awards and recognition. Marie Curie receiving the Nobel Prize with her husband was the exception not the rule. In fact, many women were accused of plagiarism because it still wasn't believed they could have done the work themselves.
Matilda Joslyn Gage, a suffragist and abolitionist, wrote the essay "Woman as an Inventor" in 1893 challenged the assertion that women couldn't have "inventive or mechanical genius" after the US Census failed to count her as an inventor within her county. 100 years later Cornell University Science Historian Margaret Rossiter named the careless or ignorant neglect of woman's scientific contributions and education THE MATILDA EFFECT for Gage.
Previously, the Matthew effect had been established by Robert K Merton who posited that credit was often given to the eminent names over their unknown colleagues. This is why the same names seem to pop up in your textbooks over and over again despite their work being a collective effort over decades.
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| Amazon: Matilda loves science and inventing. Her heroes are Marie Curie, Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison, and one day she wants to be a famous inventor herself. So when she doesn’t win the school science fair, she’s devastated – especially as the judges didn’t believe she'd come up with her entry on her own. Because she's a girl. |
Ladies Hidden by the Matilda Effect
Trota of Solerno
12th Century Medical Practitioner and Medical Writer who promoted cleanliness, balanced diet, exercise, and avoidance of stress. She also wrote a progressive book for the time on diseases of women.
Most of her work was lost until the 20th century. After her death, her work was credited to a group of men who were referred to as the Trotula ensemble and eventually Trotula was assumed to be a singular man. Trotula's medical texts on women's medicine was widely spread throughout medieval Europe.
In the 16th century due to inconsistent work under the name Trotula the author's identity was questioned. After her Practica Secundem Trotum was found she was finally given the recognition.
Nettie Stevens
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| Source: Wikipedia |
Nettie Stevens was a geneticist and biologist who didn't begin her research work until she was in her 30s. Her career was short but she published over 40 papers before her death at age 50.
While at Bryn Mawr, Stevens worked with Edmund Wilson simultaneously on sex determination in insects. Both published their findings in 1905-6 but many authors only credit Wilson for the discovery.
She was often overlooked to speak on the topic while Wilson spoke at conferences about the theory.
It wasn't until after Steven's death in 1912 that attention was drawn to her contributions and credit given to her.
Lise Meitner
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| Source: Wikipedia |
Meitner was the first woman from the University of Vienna and second in the world to earn a doctorate in Physics. She spent much of her career as a physics professor and department head at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. She was the first woman to become a full professor of Physics in Germany.
She lost these positions in the 1930s after the passage of anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany. She fled to Sweden in 1938.
Meitner worked with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman to bombard thorium with neutrons to produce different isotopes. She also worked with Otto Frisch to describe the splitting process and in 1939 called this process "fission."
In 1944, Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Nuclear Fission. She never received a Nobel Prize but was nominated 19 times in Chemistry and 29 times in Physics.
Marietta Blau
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| Source: Wikipedia |
Received her PhD in Physics in 1919 from the University of Vienna.
Blau worked as a manufacturer of X-Ray tubes in Vienna before she became an unpaid scientists at the Institute for Radium Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna. Due to a stipend from the Austrian Association of University Women she was able to research at Gottingen and Paris.
She determined a photographic emulsion technique to study cosmic rays and was the first scientist to detect neutrons using nuclear emulsions. She received the Lieben Prize for her work in 1937 with her former student Hertha Wambacher.
While Marietta was nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Physics for her work, in 1950, it was awarded to Cecil Powell for the development of the photographic method of particle detection and the discovery of the pi-meson.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell
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| Source: Wikipedia |
Earning her PhD in 1967 from Cambridge, Burnell helped construct the Interplanetary Scintillation Array.
In 1967, she detected a "bit of scruff" on her papers tracking stars in the night sky. She noted that the signal "pulsed" in her data. Bell has stated that she faced skepticism about her finding from her supervisor, Antony Hewish, and that she was not invited to many meetings held by Hewish and other collaborators.
In 1974 the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Hewish and Martin Ryle, one of the other collaborators but left out Burnell despite her name being on the published paper recognizing the discovery of pulsars.
When Burnell was included in interviews she was the "human interest" being asked about her hair color, boyfriends, and even asked to undo buttons for photographs, while her male counterparts were asked about the astrophysics.
Gladys West
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| Source: Wikipedia |
West is best known for her contributions to the mathematical modeling of the shape of the Earth, and her work on the development of satellite geodesy models that were incorporated in to the Global Positioning System.
West was the second black women hired at the Naval Proving Ground. She retired from the Proving Grounds for 42 years then completed a PhD at Virginia Tech.
During her time at the Proving Grounds she participated in a study that proved the regularity of Pluto's motion relative to Neptune. She became the project manager for the Seasat radar altimetry project.
In the 70s and 80s she programmed the IBM 7030 Stretch computer to increase the precision of the calculations she had created to model the shape of the Earth. Her data ultimately became GPS.
West's contributions to GPS were not acknowledged until she submitted a biography to her Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority although West had published several reports detailing her work.
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