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

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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