THE MATILDA EFFECT

The Matilda Effect refers to a very real phenomenon: discoveries made by women are often attributed to their male colleagues. The term comes from Matilda Joslyn Gage, a 19th-century American feminist who was already denouncing this invisibilization.

From Rosalind Franklin, overshadowed in the discovery of DNA, to Jocelyn Bell Burnell, denied the Nobel Prize for the discovery of pulsars, many women scientists have seen their work minimized or erased.