In the scientific world where rigor is king, there is a phenomenon that is causing a stain: the “Matilda effect”.
In other words, the minimization (when it is not a question of denial) of the contribution of women to advances in research for the benefit of their male colleagues who themselves reap the laurels.
For centuries, this “Matilda effect” which has the singular power to make invisible the names of the women of science at the origin of major discoveries has claimed many victims.
The best known in France: Marthe Gautier, discoverer of the chromosome responsible for trisomy 21, who died on April 30 at the age of 96.
A textbook case.
It was she who, at the end of the 1950s, discovered the supernumerary chromosome.
The beginning of glory ?
Not really.
In 2009, she tells the rest in an interview with the magazine
The research.
While she had to photograph her laboratory slides, not having the necessary equipment, she entrusted them to a student of Professor Turpin at the Trousseau Hospital (Paris XII), Jérôme Lejeune.
“I am still and I remain disgusted”
Far from giving him back his material, the latter will publish the discovery of trisomy 21, in 1959, under his own name, that of the researcher only appearing second.
He then enjoyed honors and promotions on his own, and was even crowned with the prestigious Kennedy Prize in 1962. And Marthe Gautier in all that?
Gradually rehabilitated in the wake of her 2009 interview, she will have to wait until November 2018 to finally be fully recognized and named Commander of the Legion of Honor.
Not without holding a certain resentment.
In June 2021, in the TV magazine "Complément d'Enquête", the researcher returned to this discovery of which she had been deprived.
“We work on something, we succeed and we are not even able to be recognized.
I am still and I remain disgusted
“, she had then let go.
Matilda effect example 6893803
⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://t.co/S9u0YAMYeS
— Yann Duroc 🌱 (@DurocYann) May 3, 2022
Other women were victims of this "Matilda effect" before Marthe Gautier.
Long before.
The oldest example identified by historians dates from the Middle Ages.
This is the treatise on medicine by the doctor Trotula of Salerno, an 11th century work on gynecology which was attributed to male doctors.
Medieval doctor, #TrotulaDeSalerno would be #the1stAuthorTo have published medical works on the female body.
In the 11th century, it was already causing childbirth, sexuality & menstruation.
And of course, we camouflaged this patroness of gynecology until the 20th century 👀 pic.twitter.com/zZuDEL00Yj
– Authors invisibilized (@Autrices_Invisi) December 10, 2020
What follows is a long litany of scholars and women whose work was known for the benefit of another.
Among these unjustly overlooked women is the Swedish-naturalized Austrian physicist Lise Meitner.
We owe him the discovery of nuclear fission… for which his colleague and friend, Otto Hahn, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for the results of their research.
British physicochemist Rosalind Franklin is also among the victims.
On October 18, 1962, the Nobel Prize for Medicine was awarded to three men, James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins, for the discovery of the double helix structure of DNA… which nevertheless goes to this pioneer.
Read alsoWomen in Tech: how they went from pioneering to invisible
British astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell, known for her discovery of the first pulsar?
In 1974, it was Antony Hewish, her thesis supervisor, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with Martin Ryle… Philosopher Jocelyn Bell reminds us that she had not yet graduated when she discovered it and relativizes in the BBC documentary "Beautiful Minds": "You can currently do extremely well without having won a Nobel Prize, and I have had many other prizes, and so many awards and honors that in reality , I think I had a lot more fun than if I had won the Nobel Prize.
It's kind of a flash in the pan: you have it, you're happy for a week, and it's all over, no one gives you anything after,
because there is the feeling that nothing can be on the same level.
»
A trend theorized by science historian Margaret Rossiter
As for our famous Marie Curie, she narrowly escaped the Matilda effect thanks to the intervention of her husband, who insisted on putting her forward.
Indeed, only Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie had been named by the Academy of Sciences for the joint discovery of radioactivity.
It was in the early 1980s that an American science historian, Margaret Rossiter, theorized this Matilda effect, in homage to the (unknown) feminist activist Matilda Joslyn Gage who, from the end of the 19th century in the United States , had noticed that a minority of men tended to appropriate the intellectual thought of women.
Margaret Rossiter was then studying the “Matthew effect”, a theory developed by the American sociologist Robert Merton.
In the 1960s, he had noted that certain characters were recognized to the detriment of their collaborators, often at the origin of this fame.
This name refers to a sentence from the Gospel according to Matthew: "For to those who have, to them will be given, and they will have abundance, but from those who have not, even what they have will be taken away."
“A phenomenon multiplied when it comes to women scientists, points out the historian, who replaces Matthieu by Matilda to explain this particularity.
19) There are many other women who have suffered this Matilda effect, like Rosalind Franklin who manages to take the 1st snapshot of DNA in its unfolded form, its famous helix structure, what is called snapshot 51 pic.twitter.com/nvUFfXPv7s
— Mathilde Larrere (@LarrereMathilde) May 6, 2022
“Drawing attention to it and to this trend, which goes back centuries, will perhaps inspire and help scholars of today and tomorrow to write a more equitable and accurate history and sociology of science, which which means no longer ignoring all the Matildas, but also calling attention to even more of them", urged Margaret Rossiter in "
The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science”*.
In 2019, the city of Toulouse (Haute-Garonne) paid tribute to all these women scientists by awarding them an “Allée Matilda”, with the following annotation: “for the fair place of women in research”.
*
Social Studies of Science, London, Sage Publ., May 1993.