Matilda effect

The Matilda effect is the common bias against acknowledging the contribution of woman scientists in research, whose work is often attributed to their male colleagues. This effect was first described by 19th century suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage in her essay "Woman as Inventor", and coined in 1993 by science historian Margaret W. Rossiter.

The Matilda effect is related to the Matthew effect, since eminent scientists will often get more credit than a comparatively unknown researcher, even if their work is shared or similar.

Rossiter provides several examples of this effect: Trotula, an Italian physician (11th–12th centuries), wrote books which were attributed to male authors after her death, and hostility toward women as teachers and healers led to denial of her very existence. Twentieth-century cases illustrating the Matilda effect include those of Nettie Stevens,Maria Skłodowska Curie (she was included in the 1903 Nobel Prize in physics only on the insistence of a committee member—Swedish mathematician Magnus Goesta Mittag-Leffler—and of her husband Pierre Curie), Lise Meitner, Marietta Blau, Rosalind Franklin, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell.

From an analysis of more than a thousand research publications from the years 1991-2005, it was shown that male scientists more often cite the publications of male authors than of female authors. 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. Similar cases are described in an Italian study corroborated further by American and Spanish studies.

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

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