The Matilda Effect in science

Marie Curie won not one but two Nobel Prizes and is one of only four people to have won the Nobel Prize since it was first awarded. However, if the full story is told, it would surprise us to learn that Marie Curie won it at the insistence of a member of the Committee and her co-worker and husband, Pierre Curie. Even afterward, an attempt was made to keep it from being made public and for her husband to collect the prize on her behalf.

This is not isolated and is known as the Matilda Effect. It was coined by Margaret W. Rossiter (1993) to refer to the continuing discrimination experienced by women scientists through such acts as their male research colleagues or husbands taking credit for their work, or their teamwork not being named or put at the bottom of the list, or their names being replaced by their acronyms.

Other striking cases are set out below:

• Marietta Blau and Hertha Wambacher. Together they worked on a photographic method for detecting ionizing particles. Erwin Schrödinger nominated them for the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1950, but Cecil Power was awarded for this method and the discovery of the pion. He noted that he started using this method after learning of Blau's and Wambacher's publications.
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Together with Anthony Hewish, they analyzed data from very regular and fast radio signals from space, which are called pulsars. In 1974, Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery, a fact that caused great controversy among Bell's scientific colleagues who rightly felt that he should have shared the prize.
• Maria Goeppert-Mayer. She won the Nobel Prize in Physics for her discoveries related to the nuclear structure of layers, at the age of 57 and after working without a salary because she was the wife of a professor or because her article was delayed for a year and not published in the same issue as other male scientists on the same subject.
• Chien-Shiung Wu. Radioactivity expert and known as the ‘First Lady of Physics’. She worked on the Manhattan Project where she helped develop the process for separating uranium metal into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion and conducted an experiment that contradicted the hypothetical law of conservation of parity. This discovery led to her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang winning the Nobel Prize, but she did not.
• Rosalind Franklin. Her contributions were essential for the discovery of the structure of DNA together with James Watson and Francis Crick, but her colleagues were not exactly very elegant with her. To begin with, in the ‘Nature’ article in which they published her findings, Franklin is mentioned in the last paragraph, in which they thank her for her unpublished experimental results and ideas as if she were a kind of ‘fellow’. Years later, in the book ‘The Double Helix’, Watson referred to her as saying that the best place for a feminist was in someone else's laboratory. And she added such unpresentable paragraphs as this: ‘She was determined not to emphasize her feminine attributes (...) She might have been very pretty if she had shown the slightest interest in dressing well. But she did not (...) All her dresses showed the imagination of nerdy English teenage girls. For his part, Crick admitted that Franklin could not have coffee in the staff room at King's College because it was reserved for men, a circumstance he considered simply a ‘triviality’. It was a long time before both scientists recognized the extraordinary scientific quality of their colleagues and apologized.

It is because of events like these that days such as 8 March, ‘International Women's Day’, or 11 February, ‘World Day of Women and Girls in Science’, exist to raise awareness that gender equality in science is crucial to building a better future for all people. However, women and girls still face systemic barriers and biases in pursuing careers in science.

Closing the gender gap in science requires breaking down stereotypes, promoting role models that inspire girls, supporting the advancement of women through targeted programmes, and fostering inclusive environments through policies and measures that promote inclusion, diversity and equity.