alt.hn

12/9/2025 at 5:57:55 PM

“The Matilda Effect”: Pioneering Women Scientists Written Out of Science History

 https://www.openculture.com/2025/12/matilda-effect.html

by binning

12/9/2025 at 10:02:33 PM

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.

by TitaRusell

12/9/2025 at 10:49:59 PM

> 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.

by Jensson

12/10/2025 at 9:58:15 AM

> 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.

Fun fact: discrimination based on sex was added to civil rights act only as an attempt to stop it. The idea was that civil rights extending to women are so crazy, this will stop the act passing for black men.

by watwut

12/10/2025 at 12:28:22 AM

Another way of saying this is that women forced men to stop denying them their rights. This centers women’s’ agency in the discussion rather than men.

by SequoiaHope

12/10/2025 at 1:04:39 AM

Or you could say a coalition of women and their male allies forced the state to acknowledge their innate human rights, if you wanted to focus on accuracy and cohesion.

by thatcat

12/10/2025 at 10:57:56 PM

Yes! Thats a good one too.

by SequoiaHope

12/10/2025 at 7:16:50 AM

Sure but that also means that if women in countries like Afghanistan just weren't so inherently weak, they could enjoy so many more freedoms.

by snehk

12/10/2025 at 10:57:26 PM

I don’t agree that your comment follows from my statement.

by SequoiaHope

12/10/2025 at 2:26:31 AM

>How did people even come to this bizarre conclusion?

The first reason is that it is true. All of the best evidence suggests a minor male advantage on g and a major advantage in more specific abilities, such as mental rotation. See https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2021/04/the-claim-of-substantia...

It is easy to see why that would be the case from an evolutionary point of view. Ironically, your own post contains a clue: in a male-dominated society where men are far more valued for their intelligence than women, such differences are bound to arise.

The egalitarian bad faith interpretation of this claim is that any man is smarter than Marie Curie. What it actually says is that a hypothetical Mario Curie would almost certainly outshine his real-life counterpart.

The other reason is related to sexual selection. Even if a certain man is less intelligent or physically weaker than most women, it may be adaptive for him to pretend otherwise. What beliefs come to dominate in a given population is determined by reproductive success, not directly by their truth value.

by gldrk

12/10/2025 at 6:05:06 PM

You're citing Emil Kirkegaard.

by tptacek

12/10/2025 at 3:06:37 PM

For context Wikipedia says the guy you linked to is a far right white supremacist who founded a pseudoscience journal.

by staticman2

12/10/2025 at 1:40:15 PM

The IQ difference is so small, and what the tests capture (there may be kinds of intelligence not so easily captured, a similar problem to KPI selection in general to model reality) and confounding factors such as boys historically culturally more encouraged to study, internal bias from expectations (giving up on a test because you think you are stupid), etc, the minor male advantage isn't very convincing to me.

by actionfromafar

12/9/2025 at 11:03:54 PM

A lot of (but not all) people are very insecure and cling to some personal attribute (that they put in no effort to acquire) as proof that they are superior to others (gender, race, religion, etc).

by Cornbilly

12/9/2025 at 11:28:39 PM

If you try to make a list of ways in which humans look down on each other, it'll be a truly long list. Sexism is unfortunately only a portion of it.

by nitwit005

12/9/2025 at 10:47:45 PM

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.

by 6510

12/10/2025 at 9:29:17 AM

[dead]

by stefantalpalaru

12/9/2025 at 7:09:03 PM

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.

by thayne

12/9/2025 at 9:46:42 PM

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!

by nearbuy

12/10/2025 at 1:41:04 AM

That response just makes me admire her more.

by thayne

12/10/2025 at 2:53:31 AM

That is some serious class.

by Tostino

12/10/2025 at 9:09:50 AM

There's an interview show on RTE presented by Tommy Tiernan. I don't care for him much, but I happened to be watching the episode where JJB was interviewed. The thing that makes the show interesting (modulo Tommy, the prick) is that he doesn't know who the next guest will be, and often doesn't know why they're notable even when he is told their name, live. So, he has to ask them questions. "Why are you notable?". This I love, because it's a recognition that there are many people who do, and have done, really interesting, worthwhile things without necessarily being known to more than a small segment of the population. [I feel this way about footballers and opera singers. I know a few really big names, but it's mostly a clouded mountain top to me]

So, JJB is interviewed. Approximately like this:

TT: So, who are you? Why are you interesting? JJB: I discovered pulsars. TT: ... what's a pulsar? JJB: <explanation> .. drifts into talk about Nobel prizes. JJB continues as you say to be a class act. Then onto spirituality [not my bag]

https://youtu.be/ybKNXJexutE?si=SDF8h_gKqRObJqJU

I wish I could find the whole interview for you. It was gold. Although the subject matter of the segment I linked isn't that interesting to me, the format, and spirit (sorry) of open and honest enquiry is really good IMO. I wish we had more TV like this.

by colinb

12/10/2025 at 2:11:24 PM

An interesting secondary affect of this, is that today Wikipedia is flooded with misleading attribution in the opposite direction, from presumably well-meaning groups and individuals who are overzealous in their goal of writing the women back into the record.

Groups like https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/editing-w..., https://wikimediafoundation.org/participate/rewrite/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Women_sc... approach the problem as activists rather than archivists, and edit articles not because they're seeking accuracy or because they've deeply researched a topic and discovered errors, but just on belief that the world is a better place today if the history books have more female protagonists.

I'm of the view that acknowledging the systemic discrimination that prevented women, Black people, and even working-class whites from having the opportunity to pursue scientific research historically is better than rewriting history to elevate tangential assistants into leading researchers. But, maybe diverse representation in the stories we tell is more important for the future than accuracy of those stories, it's hard to know.

by smithoc

12/10/2025 at 3:37:30 AM

Either the article chose some bad examples from this list or the list is underwhelming. After browsing a few comments explaining a bit of context for some of these entries, I read the article (comments first, always...) only to find that there wasn't much more to it.

> The Timeline series profiles a few of the women whom it describes as prime examples of the Matilda effect, including Dr. Lise Meitner...

Explanation in another comment is, long story short, she was Jewish amd the work was published in Nazi Germany. Previous to the referenced ommision, jer name was included on many published papers with the men who omitted her name on a paper published at a more tenuous time.

> Likewise, the name of Alice Augusta Ball has been “all but scrubbed from the history of medicine,” though it was Ball, an African American chemist from Seattle, Washington, who pioneered what became known as the Dean Method, a revolutionary treatment for leprosy.

This one seems egregious. After looking at a few other sources, it seems to be consensus.

Dean published their/her work in his own name and, while giving others credit for their contributions, completely ommitted Ball who, seemingly, made the most significant contribution.

> Other women in the Matilda effect series include bacterial geneticist Esther Lederberg, who made amazing discoveries in genetics that won her husband a Nobel Prize...

This also seems to be a good example but it was interesting to see that her husband seemed to steal the credit. They later divorced but not until 10 years after the Nobel. I tried to find more information on it but didn't find anything not paywalled that addressed that.

> Irish astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967, but was excluded from the Nobel awarded to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish and astronomer Martin Ryle.

Addressed in another comment, she was a student at the time and they, apparently, don't award the Nobel to students in most circumstances. She, herself, doesn't believe she should have won it.

> 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.

A similar but different circumstance as Burnell. Franklin died well before the prize was awarded and they don't give the award posthumously. Allegations of stolen research seem disputed and the authors did give her credit for her research in the paper.

by parineum

12/9/2025 at 9:54:11 PM

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 Göttingen.”

> 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.

by tetris11

12/9/2025 at 11:09:35 PM

She is not an example, she was hardly written out of science history, there were theorems named after her etc. That some people discriminated against her doesn't mean she is an example of the Matilda effect.

by Jensson

12/10/2025 at 12:43:18 PM

She had also two things working against her at the time: her gender and a Jewish family background.

I forget her name, but there was a Soviet psychiatrist who pioneered research into autistic children before Hans Asperger. She was female, Jewish and from the USSR, and I think barely acknowledged even within the Iron Curtain countries. Someone here may remember her.

by nephihaha

12/10/2025 at 12:37:01 PM

My vote would be for Ada Lovelace. She is arguably the first computer programmer. She has received more attention recently but definitely a pioneer.

by nephihaha

12/9/2025 at 9:14:19 PM

> 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.

by coredog64

12/9/2025 at 9:28:42 PM

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.

by mandevil

12/10/2025 at 4:04:32 AM

The person really getting written out of history in this thread is Raymond Gosling, the PhD student, who actually took the famous "Photo 51"[0] that, along with other evidence, confirmed Watson and Crick's pre-existing hypothesis about the structure of DNA.

As Franklin was leaving the lab, Wilkins became Gosling's supervisor and the rest is history. Describing it as "her data" is not accurate -- the image belonged to King's College, not Franklin personally.

Whether or not Franklin received sufficient credit for her contributions I will leave to others to debate.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photo_51

by exidy

12/9/2025 at 10:55:38 PM

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).

by dekhn

12/9/2025 at 11:19:30 PM

Yes, she had a paper, hastily thrown together because Watson and Crick were going to publish her data without her consent, and even to the men of 1952, what they had done to her was seen as pretty scuzzy, so they tried to give her an opportunity to at least claim a little credit. But this is a sign that even the the people around them saw that Franklin had been done wrong by Watson and Crick and Wilkins.

As far as "she shared it in a departmental seminar once, therefore her boss can just give it to others to beat her in the analysis phase without her consent" and "I don't think she would have gotten it right," neither of those are actually arguments. One of them is not how science is supposed to be done, the other is an un-provable assertion that a woman wasn't smart enough to figure something out, which makes me a little suspicious.

by mandevil

12/10/2025 at 1:29:18 AM

How exactly did you get to "a woman wasn't smart enough to figure something out, which makes me a little suspicious."? It sounds like you're saying I think she wasn't smart? I am merely reporting the facts as they have been reported, based on a number of different books/articles.

It was an intrinsically hard problem that Crick was especially prepared to solve. I doubt the vast majority of scientists, regardless of their sex, would have been able to solve the problem with the data they had.

Generally once you share data publicly, there is a blanket rule that people can use that data. Many people claim W&C stole the data (through Wilkins) but that does not seem to be true.

by dekhn

12/9/2025 at 9:34:30 PM

"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

by dwa3592

12/9/2025 at 9:30:40 PM

> 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

by jrflowers

12/9/2025 at 10:17:03 PM

> 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.

by fn-mote

12/9/2025 at 11:17:12 PM

They followed the provided link, blame the person who posted the link not the person who says the link wasn't helpful.

If you try to back up your points with citations then those citations should help strengthen your case, you might still be right even if you cite bad articles but its still right to criticize bad citations.

by Jensson

12/10/2025 at 9:36:00 AM

[dead]

by stefantalpalaru

12/10/2025 at 12:02:45 AM

If a discovery is good, someone else will want to steal the credit for it. That would apply to discoveries made by men or women. I highly doubt that there is any proof of a sexist conspiracy to steal the limelight from women specifically.

STEM is mostly dominated by men, so there is both more men to make discoveries and more men to swoop in and steal credit for a discovery.

by bill_joy_fanboy

12/10/2025 at 3:51:59 PM

You have an article of example after example of women in STEM having their work stolen and your conclusion is "well it's all a wash and happens to everyone". Seems like you just want to bury your head in sand.

by jajuuka

12/9/2025 at 11:53:19 PM

Lise Meitner is a fascinating case of how all of this works.

Otto Hahn had run the radioactivity department at the Max Planck Institute (at the time the Kaiser Wilhelm Society) for most of the 1920's and 1930's, working very closely with Lise Meitner- the two published numerous papers together, sharing credit. The two were really close friends. Eventually a third guy, Frtiz Strassman joined and they wrote more papers as the three of them, though Otto was the senior scientist and the head of the department, so definitely had more social and scientific capital than either of the other two. He was not a Nazi, but was considered Aryan by the Nazis, as was Strassman. But Meitner was Jewish. Hahn helped her escape to Denmark, where she met her nephew (and fellow scientist) Otto Frisch who had fled earlier. Then in 1938 Stressman and Hahn did an experiment and couldn't explain it; following their pattern for the past three decades, when Hahn had an experiment he couldn't explain he took it Meitner and she figured it out, this time with her nephew. Meitner and Frisch told Hahn and Strassman they needed a chemist, and the four turned to the chemist Wilhelm Traube to confirm that bucket of uranium now had barium in it, and now they had proof that fission had occurred.

So Hahn and Strassman had conducted the experiment, Meitner and Frisch had explained it, and Traube had proved the explanation correct- in a modern scientific context all five of their names would be on the same paper. But because of the Nazi's Hahn had met Meitner in Copenhagen to explain the findings to her, and then she had telegraphed back what to look for when she and Frisch understood what had happened. And it was essentially impossible for Hahn and Strassman to publish this paper with Meitner's name on it- not because she was a woman (they had published many times with all three names on it at this point) but because the Nazis would not allow Aryans and Jews to publish papers together. So Meitner and Frisch had a paper published in Nature a few weeks after the one by Hahn and Strassman had been published in Naturwissenschafte. Hahn and Strassman both considered Meitner especially to be a co-discoverer of fission with them (Frisch was not directly involved with the two in Berlin, but he had worked with Meitner after Hahn had explained to her.)

During the war Traube, who was also Jewish, died in SS custody (Hahn claims that he was a few hours too late to get him released- and he definitely helped Meitner escape so it is not implausible). Meitner became a Swedish citizen[1]. Frisch co-wrote the MAUD report urging the British to build an atomic bomb, and then went to Los Alamos to actually work on the first Atomic bomb. This does point to a major underlying problem that any notional German atomic bomb program might have- 60% of the Grossdeutschland team who discovered fission were either killed by Nazis or fled them, with only two members of the team available to a (notional) German atomic bomb program and one in New Mexico working on the (actually existing) UN program.

So the question becomes, why did Hahn alone get the Nobel for fission when it was such a collaboration? Here the answer is, geopolitics. If you look at the records of the Nobel committee in November 1945 (they announced the 1944 and 1945 prizes together in November 1945 with the war over) [2] there was clearly international politics involved.

"...concerns the prizes awarded under the exceptional conditions that reigned in the immediate aftermaths of the two world wars. In both periods, decisions were influenced by the political notion that the prizes, awarded by Swedish scientists who had remained neutral in the conflicts, could be used to reestablish prewar internationalism in science. One way to do that was to rehabilitate the losers."[3] So that is why Germany got the 1919 and 1944 Nobel Prizes, and Meitner didn't get any credit from the Nobel committee.

1: Accord to https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/a-nobel-tale-of-postwa... this actually hurt Meitner's chances: in 1945 when the prizes were being awarded she was working for a Swedish previous Nobel winner Manne Siegbahn and was very unhappy, and left his lab in 1946, and he was one of the key voices in the Nobel awarding committee and seems to have held a grudge against her. 2: ibid 3: ibid

by mandevil

12/9/2025 at 9:13:21 PM

[dead]

by NedF

12/9/2025 at 7:54:42 PM

[dead]

by VinayUPrabhu

12/9/2025 at 9:58:14 PM

[flagged]

by brindlejim

12/9/2025 at 10:13:41 PM

I am interested in substantive criticism of the article. I am not interested in a shallow dismissal, which I consider your post.

by fn-mote

12/9/2025 at 10:40:45 PM

How would you rate your victim story?

by actionfromafar

12/9/2025 at 8:28:17 PM

[flagged]

by complianceowl

12/9/2025 at 7:56:31 PM

[flagged]

by startupsfail

12/9/2025 at 8:27:47 PM

Pushed out by whom? Replaced by whom?

by darkwater

12/9/2025 at 8:37:05 PM

Other men. The point is there is a general push to claim credit for someone else’s work, whether that’s a man or a woman.

by dyauspitr

12/10/2025 at 2:46:21 PM

If, in the realm of science, there was a more or less equal number of women pushing out men (and women), then you might be right. But it was not and it is not like that.

by darkwater

12/10/2025 at 5:28:29 AM

It's funny how Men vs Women in Science, or IQ standard deviation differences still result in such heated debates, while at the same time...

by startupsfail