The ‘Matilda Effect’: How These Female Scientists Were Deprived of Their Discovery by Men

Few of the French would be able to name a great scientist, except for Marie Curie. However, there were talented researchers who made great discoveries. However, their genius was less known than that of men. Most of the time, it is because their spouse, boss, or male colleague takes over their work duties. It’s called the “Matilda effect”: a sexist way of obscuring the names of great female scientists. The victims’ work is often not acknowledged until years later.

In the early 1980s, the American historian of science, Margaret Rossiter, theorized this concept by paying homage to the American feminist Matilda Joslyn Gage who noted this recurring trend, at the end of the nineteenth century, of the appropriation of women. intellectual thought. This is a reference to the “Matthew effect”, the theory according to which the system maintains dominance of the richest over the poorest, but it can also be applied to the world of research.

A sexual tradition since the Middle Ages

The oldest example certainly dates back to the Middle Ages, when a treatise on gynecology by an Italian physician Trotola Salerno It was attributed to a male physician in the eleventh century. At the time, it was not reasonable for a woman to be able to practice this profession. This was followed, during the Renaissance, by trials of witchcraft for women who sometimes found miracle cures that may have worked better than those used by doctors.

Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin, and Jocelyn Bell have lost three Nobel Prizes

Among these unjustly misunderstood women is the Austrian physicist Lise Meitner. Her example is especially telling: it was she who was discovered nuclear fission With colleagues Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann. But they are just who received Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944. The Jewish scholar had to seek refuge in Sweden to protect herself from Nazi Germany and was forgotten.

Rosalind Franklin, British chemical physicists, however, suffered the same fate: they did not receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962although it played a crucial role in its discovery DNA structure. His colleagues James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins were crowned.

British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell, She also missed out on the final reward. However, in 1967, thanks to the construction of his radio telescope, he discovered the first pulsar (swirling neutron stars that emit beams of electromagnetic radiation) and is very important today in astrophysics. in 1974His thesis supervisor was Anthony Hewish, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics…

Matilda’s influence certainly contributed to the stereotype that people today mistakenly imagine that technical and scientific professions are more masculine than feminine. However, there are many examples of successful women in science: Emilie de Châtelet (the 18th century mathematician and physicist who translated Newton), Ada Lovelace (creator of the first real computer program), and Catherine Johnson (mathematician who contributed to the success of the Apollo 11 mission). in 1969), Françoise Barre-Sinussi (immunologist and virologist, 2008 Nobel Prize in Medicine, who discovered the AIDS virus) …

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