The Matilda Effect

[ancianita]

Last edited Mon Mar 27, 2023, 10:46 AM - Edit history (1)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_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,[3] Lise Meitner, Marietta Blau, Rosalind Franklin, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

In 2012, two female researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen showed that in the Netherlands the sex of professorship candidates influences the evaluation made of them.[6] Similar cases are described by two Italian female researchers in a study[7] corroborated further by a Spanish study.[8] On the other hand, several studies found no difference between citations and impact of publications of male authors and those of female authors.[9][10][11]

Swiss researchers have indicated that mass media ask male scientists more often to contribute on shows than they do their female fellow scientists.[12]

According to one U.S. study, "although overt gender discrimination generally continues to decline in American society," "women continue to be disadvantaged with respect to the receipt of scientific awards and prizes, particularly for research."[13]

[betsuni]

1. K&R

[gademocrat7]

2. K&R!

[Phoenix61]

3. How often is Hedy Lamar remembered for other than being a beautiful film star. nt

[progressoid]

34. It's pronounced Hedley!

Link to tweet

[Efilroft Sul]

44. In the telecom/networking field, she's well-known for frequency-hopping spread-spectrum technology.

Back in the day, when I used to write a catalog for a networking components company, I made sure she was given her due in a backgrounder that explained the history and usefulness of FHSS. Hedy Lamarr is probably one of a handful of people in the last 100 years who have had the greatest impact on our daily lives.

[Phoenix61]

46. So happy to hear that. nt

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R

[Ligyron]

5. Absolutely no doubt about it.

Question is...is it really any getting better or perhaps worse and if worse, then when did it start to reverse? Was it about the time around 2016 when Trump won the Presidency?

[SharonAnn]

26. It happened to me, in the computer field, in the 1970's.

I developed an idea for our Fortune 100 company, sold it to management and got the funding for it, wrote 95% of the code for it, designed and implemented the database for it, tested and implemented it the code, and managed the department for it for 2 1/2 years. It was an internal system for a Fortune 100 company and saved it a LOT of money by automating the processes.

Later I was introduced to the man who "developed" the system. I was shocked that anyone believed that. I had assigned him to write one small portion of the code (less than 5% of it) because he had no assignments at the time and my boss wanted to keep him busy. I didn't keep him on the project because he wasn't that good.

Come to find out, he had been going around for years telling people that he developed the system and that I was only managing it because they had to have a "woman" to show Equal Opportunity! And people believed it, even though they knew me and at least some of my design, development, testing, and managing of the system.

[Ligyron]

33. Holy Crap!

Dude has a lot of nerve even trying something like that and apparently he didn't think he'd be found out or you believed I guess so he just didn't care

I know there's a lot of cutthroat activity going on in the corporate world but that sounds like something J.R. would have pulled on Dallas. Or more appropriately, Jodi Foster in Contact.

I'm sorry this happened to you and even though there's no doubt a lot of this happening with either sex being both the aggressor and/or the victim, in this case he obviously took advantage of the situation because he thought you were "just a girl".

I sure hope you were able to do at least something to rectify this hijacking of your significant, money saving accomplishment by that sexist pig.

[NNadir]

6. The most troubling case for me is Meitner.

She did however, posthumously receive the highest award a scientist can receive, an element named for her.

The irony is that the name of the male scientist who won the Nobel Prize for her discovery, nuclear fission, had his name proposed for an element, Hahnium, but it was dropped.

Hahn's treatment of his scientific collaborator for decades, Meitner, was atrocious.

Compared to her he was a lab tech.

[Otto_Harper]

9. A few decades ago

I was a member of a team tasked with coming up with a couple of dozen names for conference rooms at a major tech company which was building a new headquarters. They wanted each conference room to be named after a major scientist, Among the names we proposed was Meitner. But, since no one in upper mgmt had heard of her and she wasn't associated with our company, its technology or its product, she was summarily cut from the list.

[NNadir]

42. My experience with many members of the "upper management," myself...

...excluded, is that they generally don't look at the periodic table, and if they do, they're spectacularly disinterested in the actinides.

Meitner is recorded there, along with Einstein, Fermi, Rutherford, Bohr, Lawrence, and Seaborg.

The era in which a knowledge of science was a requisite for high technology companies is over, albeit at a huge threat to humanity.

[Otto_Harper]

43. Those same beknighted individuals also vetoed

Rachel Fuller Brown and Elizabeth Lee Hazen, the developers of Nystatin, an essential fungicidal medication.

[NNadir]

45. Ah well, I love that word, "benighted." I can't think of a better place for using it.

[Wicked Blue]

7. Marie Curie

When I was in school, we were taught that her husband was responsible for the discoveries

[muriel_volestrangler]

27. That's unusual - mostly, she's better known than him

and, at the time, she won her second Nobel on her own. Society as a whole recognised her - it was your school that tried to diminish her.

[Wicked Blue]

31. It was the textbook

Probably around 1960

[plimsoll]

8. I think it's a power thing.

The powerful in group always minimizes or suppresses the accomplishments of the out group. Blacks have made tremendous contributions to the US, but that is often glossed over if not actually made illegal to talk about in Floriduh.

What we need to do is figure out who is perpetuating these institutionalized bigotry because they are unaware, and who does so for malign purposes. That’s the panic with “WOKE” being unaware can be addressed. If you are afraid of the “WOKE mind virus” you’re probably harboring some malignant bigotry you don’t want exposed.

[niyad]

10. and the WAR ON WOMEN continues apace. Would you consider cross-posting this in

Women's Rights And Issues? Thanks in advance.

[edhopper]

11. Rosalind Franklin

was as important as Watson and Crick.

[Botany]

13. She is the one who I.d.ed the double helix from a microscopic X-ray.

But for years they took credit for the discovery of the double helix.

[ancianita]

19. You remind me of how Walter Isaacson, biographer of Steve Jobs, later Jennifer Doudna, 2020 Nobel

Prize winner in Chemistry for being the first to "see" RNA and atomically map it -- which led to the new RNA vaccines we now have. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Doudna

Isaacson, in The Code Breaker -- Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and the Future of the Human Race (2021) wrote a lot about Doudna's great admiration for Rosalyn Franklin and other female scientists. Her speech at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's annual CRISPR conference in August, 2020 (overlooking Long Island Sound) reflected that.

The meeting celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of Rosalind Franklin, whose pioneering work on the structure of DNA inspired Doudna, when she read The Double Helix as a young girl, to believe that women could do science. The cover of the meeting's program featured a colorized photograph of Franklin peering into a microscope.

Fyodor Urnov, who directed the COVID testing lab that Doudna created at Berkeley, gave th opening tribute to Franklin. He made it a serious look at her scientific work, including her research into the location of RNA in tobacco mosaic viruses. His only flourish came at the end when he showed a picture of Franklin's empty lab bench after her death. "The best way to honor her is to remember that the structural sexism she faced remains with us today," he said, his voice choking up. "Rosalind is the godmother of gene editing."

I highly recommend Doudna's biography, which deals with the ongoing structural dominance of men in science.

[Botany]

22. Barbara McClintock is my hero. Long before anybody else she explained that genes "jump" to new ...

.. locations on the chromosomes and she was 30 years ahead of her male counter parts who dismissed her
findings. She was awarded a noble prize in the 1980s for her work.

[ancianita]

24. Awesome. I'll read up on her, since these women don't get the same historical public recognition.

Starting here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_McClintock

Doudna recalls her trembling feeling as she passed McClintock on a path at Cold Spring Harbor years earlier. The lab was built on a belief in the magic of in-person meetings, and the serendipity that comes from the good cheer and unstructured engagement that comes with beautiful surroundings.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

12. Mileva Maric, Einstein's first wife

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mileva_Mari%C4%87#Debate_over_collaboration

[jaxexpat]

14. I think it's high time that the public knows....

A. Einstein was trans, relatively and obviously.

[usaf-vet]

15. The Mitilda Effect was going on in the run-up to WW II. Elizabeth Smith Friedman breaking Nazi codes

And helping law enforcement to break up the Rum Runners coded messages during prohibition.

The whole story of her skills and successes was hidden from the public by the likes of J. Edgar Hoover and the U.S. Military until after her death in the 1980s.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/codebreaker-elizebeth-friedman-fought-nazi-spies/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_6431115

MOVIE
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/codebreaker/?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=campaign_6431115

My dad was one of the USN Radioman stationed in South America listening posts, intercepting German U-Boat transmissions. And passing them up the chain of command, eventually helping to sink the U-boats before they could attack troops and supply ships. In the South Atlantic. During the war in North Africa, chasing Rommel's Nazi troops and tanks.

[thatcrowwoman]

36. Thank you for the movie link, usaf-vet.

I just watched it, and what a story.
Beautifully told.
🕊thatcrowwoman

[burrowowl]

41. Thanks for link

[2naSalit]

16. Ran into it often when I was working.

No woman can be brilliant, intelligent or confident in her intelligence and achievements. They must be forced to heel at all costs.

I'm not kidding.

[SharonAnn]

29. Oh, don't I know it.

[OMGWTF]

32. THIS! THIS! THIS!

Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astair did, but backward and in high heels.

[2naSalit]

35. Exactly...

I could run circles around my male cohorts and consistently doing their jobs better than they did but still treated like I was lucky they put with me, and pf course, tried to pay me less than them. All companies were the same, just different paint jobs.

[Joinfortmill]

17. What we used to call the 'good ole boy' network.

[Backseat Driver]

18. I don't think this "effect" was/is limited to science. There were also many

authors and artists who took male names in order to better become published or gain recognition in their field.

https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/12-female-writers-who-wrote-under-male-pseudonyms/

https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/women-artists-works-misattributed/

All for a variety of stated reasons including discrimination, hiding lifestyles, or to promote then (as now?) unpopular gender equality in their themes of literature or art.

Of course, "Hidden Figures" portrayed the real women mathematicians who received the double whammy of racial and gender discrimination and lack of recognition of their stories.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/forgotten-black-women-mathematicians-who-helped-win-wars-and-send-astronauts-space-180960393/

[ancianita]

21. "Limited to science" is not what anyone here is saying at all. Science is just one of many arenas

Last edited Mon Mar 27, 2023, 02:31 PM - Edit history (1)

where The Matilda Effect is perpetrated by males.

Thank you for the links.

[Ilsa]

20. A friend's sister gave her daughters gender neutral names like

Blake, Remy, Whitley, Morgan, etc. to try to remove the first obstacle to discrimination.

[Hekate]

23. Wise move, as resumes and transcripts introduce a person before they are even seen.

[crickets]

25. K&R for the post and the discussion.

[WestMichRad]

28. Thank you all for this thread and the informative replies!

Lots of good references for further reading… yay!

I’m a retired scientist who saw the good ol’ boys network in action. There were very few lead women scientists there… nearly none. They just weren’t given an opportunity to demonstrate their skills.

[thatcrowwoman]

37. Thank you, ancianita, for this interesting and enlightening post.

When my daughter was in school, everyday as she got on the bus or out of her dad’s car, he would tell her, “I love you, little bird. Now let’s get out there and learn something today!”
And I just did, grâce à vous.
Merci beaucoup!
🕊thatcrowwoman
(I’m also re/learning French with Duolingo.)

[ancianita]

38. De nada, mi amiga.

[Permanut]

39. I tell everyone who will listen about Henrietta Leavitt..

Discovered the magnitude correlation to distance for cepheid variable stars. Sounds like absolute magic to me.

[panader0]

40. Let's not forget Mary Jackson, a black female NASA scientist made famous in the movie

"Hidden Figures". She overcame the prejudices of sex and race to become one of the premier scientists
at NASA.