Why women's names vanished from science

Until the mid-20th century, the scientific record worked simply: only a member could present a paper to a society, and members were men. The Royal Society of London elected its first women fellows only in 1945. A woman would give her finished text to a man - her husband, brother, or supervisor - and his name stayed in the record. Formally, no one had stolen anything: the rule was about who had the right to speak in the room.

The second layer was job title. At the Harvard Observatory, from the 1880s onward, dozens of women sorted photographic plates showing stellar spectra; they were called “computers.” The observatory's director signed its circulars. A 1912 circular on the period-luminosity relation, which later became the basis for measuring distances to distant galaxies, bears his signature, while Henrietta Leavitt's name appears in the first line of the explanation. A generation later, people cite the signature, not the explanation.

The third layer was surname. Early papers appeared under a maiden name, later ones under a married name, while indexes were organized by surname: one person split into two incomplete entries. If you looked for such a researcher in an index, you found two different people and not one whole person. Some used initials so their work would be read without bias. Add up all three layers, and you get a list of names with almost no women in it.

In 1968, sociologist Robert Merton described the “Matthew effect”: from the same piece of work, a famous scientist gets more recognition than an unknown coauthor. On a team where a woman was almost always junior - a graduate student, assistant, or lab technician - this imbalance worked in one direction automatically, without anyone deciding it should.

In 1993, science historian Margaret Rossiter gave this a name: the “Matilda effect,” after a suffragist who wrote as early as 1883 that women's inventions were credited to men. The best-known example is the discovery of pulsars in 1967: a graduate student was the first to notice the signal on a paper strip, while the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics went to her supervisor and his senior colleague.