By Aditi Malhotra
The history and development of science, like the rest of history we study, seems to be a concatenation of almost exclusively white men, except the rare token woman briefly stated in the course of events – one who earned the honor bestowed to her but was still considered a divergence from the norm. According to The Timeline series The Matilda Effect, “If you believe the history books, 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 has inevitably become nothing more than faded ink on yellowed papers of history that remain neglected.
The Matilda Matthew Effect, coined by Margaret Rossiter for suffragist and activist Matilda Joslyn Gage, refers to a systematic undervaluing of women’s contributions to science and literature. It explains how women frequently end up receiving little to no credit for their scientific contributions, less credit than an objective review would garner, while it is mostly awarded to their male colleagues and collaborators.
Gage, born 1826, directed most of her efforts towards abolitionist activism and the flourishing suffragist movement. She spoke at the third National Woman’s Rights Convention in Syracuse, in 1852, and was a founding member of the National Woman Suffrage Association. She was also the first known American woman to publish a study on American women in science, resulting in a paper titled ‘Woman As An Inventor’ in which Gage says, “no assertion in reference to woman is more common than that she possesses no inventive or mechanical genius …. but, while such statements are carelessly or ignorantly made, tradition, history, and experience alike prove her possession of these faculties in the highest degree. Although women's scientific education has been grossly neglected, yet some of the most important inventions in the world are due to her.”
This paper was published in 1870 and more than a century later, Rossiter ironically happened to stumble upon Gage’s work during her research on the systematic bias against women in science and adjacent search for a name for the prevalent phenomenon. Gage, having been mostly written out of history, was a precedent of the Matilda Effect herself. As Rossiter notes in her landmark paper ‘The Matthew Matilda Effect In Science,’ Gage “glimpsed what was happening, perceived the pattern, deplored it, but herself experienced some of the very phenomena described.”
During her long dedication to the research of underrepresentation of women in science, Rossiter also published a landmark study titled ‘Women Scientists in America’ that was divided into three volumes. The first volume, ‘Struggles and Strategies to 1940’ recounted the rich history of key female figures in science while unearthing the methodical manner in which these women were deterred and left without acknowledgement. The subsequent two volumes documented the gradual and uphill battle fought by women to progress in the field.
As Rossiter claimed in the first volume, the lack of acclaim women have consistently received in science “was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science.”
Now, even in the modern world, prominent women in science recognise the importance of Rossiter’s work. Anna Fausto-Sterling, a Brown University professor emerita and expert on developmental genetics called Rossiter’s research legendary, saying that “it meant that I should never believe anything anybody tells me about what women did or didn’t do in the past, nor should I take that as any measure of what they could do in the future.”
Rossiter’s work was the inaugural step towards the realisation that academic institutions needed far more reform in order to be more hospitable towards women.
Of all the otherwise forgotten women in science that have been given the recognition they deserve far too late, Anne Dagg, Lise Meitner, Alice Augusta Ball, Esther Lederberg and Rosalind Franklin are a scarce few examples.
Anne Dagg, the trailblazer into the study of African wildlife, was the first Westerner to carry out such a study unobserved and without any contact with the animals. In spite of her pioneering work and complete PhD, she was denied tenure time and time again. Lise Meitner, meanwhile, was victim to the infamous theft of Nobel credit and acclaim for discovering nuclear fission, by her collaborator, Otto Hahn.
Rossiter herself is living proof of this recurring phenomenon, as she struggled to land a tenure position for almost 15 years in spite of her exceptional credentials.
Both Matilda Gage and Margaret Rossiter made undeniably important contributions to academia that went disregarded for far too long, and ironically, both tried to spotlight women who were fated to go through the same ignorance. Even with lives separated by more than a century, the work of one formed the foundations to that of the other in an association that worked across time to further women in academia.
