Hidden Figures, the Matilda Effect and the Historical Erasure of Women in STEM

Have you ever heard some random incel in the comments spout something like “men created the entire world, what did women contribute?!” First of all, I’m sorry you had to encounter such vile manosphere drivel. My favorite retort to such nonsense is to womansplain to said dumbass that he wouldn’t even be tapping out such a comment on his phone without the work of Hedy Lamarr, who co-invented the secure wireless tech that enabled the very wifi connection that he clearly does not deserve to be using.

It’s not that women haven’t contributed many scientific discoveries, crucial inventions or amazing innovations. It’s just that we don’t hear enough about it, or they are too often not credited or recognized for their work, while their male colleagues take home Nobel Prizes. If men “built the world” then it was all by building it off of women’s unpaid and unseen labor.

On the long flight back from Southeast Asia this spring, I watched a film from 2016 that I’d somehow missed, Hidden Figures. It told the story of three unsung heroes that I certainly don’t remember hearing about in history class (even though I did a big history project on the Apollo missions that they helped make possible). Before there were computers, humans were the computers. Women like Katherine Johnson did all the complicated calculations that put people on the freakin’ moon.

The three protagonists of the film (which was originally a book by Margot Lee Shetterly) are based on Black women who worked at NASA’s Langley Research Center: Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson. Katherine was a human computer and her calculations of orbital mechanics were critical to the success of the first NASA crewed spaceflights. Dorothy was also a mathematician and computer who as a supervisor, taught herself and her team computer programming, ensuring her team’s jobs weren’t replaced by machines. Mary also started as a computer and after advocating for herself to be able to take engineering courses, became NASA’s first Black female engineer.

What absolute legends! These women and many others who worked at NASA during the space race made it possible for the US to be the first to send people to the moon, and more importantly, get them home safely. Yet I don’t remember seeing any of their names when studying the Apollo missions in junior high history class! Hidden Figures indeed. They definitely deserve more of a spotlight and I’m not sure how I missed seeing the film until a decade after it came out.

So why is it that we didn’t learn more about Hidden Figures like Katherine, Dorothy, Mary and their colleagues? Put simply, it’s The Matilda Effect in action, enabled of course, by the patriarchy. What is that, and who the hell is Matilda?

In her essay on Medium, Becca VanDrunen defines this all-too-common issue: “The Matilda effect is the phenomena in science where the accomplishments of female scientists are under-recognized or entirely credited to male scientists. Named in honour of American suffragette, activist, and writer Matilda Joslyn Gage, the Matilda effect highlights the discrimination faced by women in fields of STEM which prevents them from obtaining status or recognition as a result of their hard work and dedication to their research.”

This effect was first recognized by science historian Margaret Walsh Rossiter at Cornell University. Examples date back to ancient times like Hypatia of Alexandria and Fatima al-Fihri, and span through modern history like Rosalind Franklin and Alice Ball. Women of color like Chien-Shiung Wu and Mary Maynard Daly had to face the added layer of racism on top of the sexism that often kept them from receiving recognition for their achievements.

Sometimes male colleagues received credit for their work (or even Nobel Prizes). Sometimes their brothers or husbands overshadowed them or their contributions to their shared work were never properly acknowledged. Albert Einstein’s first wife Mileva Einstein-Marić was also a brilliant physicist and there is speculation that she contributed a great deal to his early work, especially on the theory of relativity, for example.

Much like the hidden emotional labor that women are disproportionately saddled with under the patriarchy, erasure, silencing, and the expectation that women be content hiding in the shadows are tales as old as time. But it’s time these brilliant minds were honored for their dedicated service to science and humanity.

So, how can we reverse this trend? It can start with rewriting history and correcting the mis-attributions of the past to give credit where it’s due going forward. And we can simply share the stories of women in STEM more often, shining a spotlight on those behind the scenes, like the human computers at NASA and the programmers and computer scientists like Margaret Hamilton at MIT who helped make the Apollo Missions and more possible.

We can champion women of science like The Matilda Project, an educational initiative that intends to interrupt gender bias and the Matilda Effect, celebrate the often overlooked contributions of women scientists, and share the stories and contributions of women in STEM throughout history and today.

And we can hire, promote, fund and recommend more women for leadership in STEM. That will mean bringing back and retooling the DEI initiatives that were cut short by the current administration’s rampant sexism and racism. White women have benefitted from DEI more than any other demographic, but it’s time those benefits reached to less privileged women who face intersectional discrimination from every angle.

We can also support women-led organizations, businesses, and researchers. We can fund more studies on women and the types of issues they face, especially in healthcare (women weren’t even required to be a part of human drug trials until the 90s). Investors can focus on funding projects led by women and people working to bring about the matriarchy.

One example I love of supporting women entrepreneurs and leaders comes from Ela Shapira, aka The Startup Doula, who I met on LinkedIn. She helps women turn a business idea into a profitable startup, and she recently built a project called Mycelium, where women can list their businesses in the directory, network, hire each other, or trade hours working for each other in the time bank. Even if you can’t invest money in a woman-led business, this network allows you to work for a member’s business and then trade those hours getting support from other women on your business. The stated purpose of Mycelium is “Redirecting the flow of money and power to women.” Hell yeah.

If we can’t escape patriarchal capitalism completely, at least we can creatively redirect its spoils to better places than the overstuffed coffers of yet another old, rich, white dude.

Women (and trans and non-binary folks) have always been an integral part of the scientific community and contributed, often at great personal risk and sacrifice, to many scientific discoveries, mathematical theories, and innovative technologies. Without women, there would be no wifi or kevlar, we wouldn’t fully understand things like radiation or DNA, and who knows if or when the US would have made it to the moon and back. (Among MANY other things). It’s time we gave credit where it was due, consistently, and correct the history where these contributions were missed. It’s time to set the record straight and make sure future generations of women and girls don’t have to deal with the Matilda Effect.

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