But he failed “to mention Ball’s key contribution” despite protestations from Dr.

Arthur Dean, who had co-taught chemistry classes with Ball, continued her work. Meitner, who directed Hahn’s most significant experiments and calculated the energy release resulting from fission, received a few essentialist headlines followed by decades of obscurity.” (See Meitner and Hahn in the photo above.) 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.īall conducted her research at the University of Hawaii, but she tragically died at the age of 24, in what was likely a lab accident, before the results could be published. Instead, Meitner’s colleague Otto Hahn received the accolades, a Nobel Prize in Chemistry and “renown as the discoverer of nuclear fission. Instead, “Meitner led the research that ultimately discovered nuclear fission.” But Meitner would become “little more than a footnote in the history of Nazi scientists and the birth of the Atomic age.” Lise Meitner, the Austrian-born physicist and pioneer of nuclear technology who escaped the Nazis and became known in her time as “the Jewish Mother of the Bomb,” though she had nothing to do with the atomic bomb.

The Timeline series profiles of the few of the women whom it describes as prime examples of the Matilda effect, including Dr. women scientists inspired the History of Science Society to name a prestigious prize after her. Over 100 years later, Rossiter’s tenacious work in unearthing the contributions of U.S. In 1993, Cornell University historian of science Margaret Rossiter dubbed the denial of recognition to women scientists “the Matilda effect,” for suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose 1893 essay “ Woman as an Inventor” protested the common assertion that “woman… possesses no inventive or mechanical genius.” Gage wrote that “even the United States census” failed “to enumerate her among the inventors of the country.” Such assertions, Gage proceeded to demonstrate, “are carelessly or ignorantly made… although woman’s scientific education has been grossly neglected, yet some of the most important inventions of the world are due to her.”

But too often, there is an unsung woman genius who deserves just as much credit” and who has been overshadowed by male colleagues who grabbed the glory. Discoveries are made by men, which spur further innovation by men, followed by acclaim and prizes for men. “If you believe the history books,” notes the Timeline series The Matilda Effect, “science is a guy thing. The history of science, like most every history we learn, comes to us as a procession of great, almost exclusively white, men, unbroken but for the occasional token woman-well-deserving of her honors but seemingly anomalous nonetheless.

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