Have you ever heard of the ‘Matilda Effect’? Which is not, by the way, related in any way to the country of Australia, where ‘Waltzing Matilda’ is a secondary, casual national anthem. Well, the Matilda Effect’ was a term coined by Margaret W. Rossiter. Who dat? Lemme explain, and why she matters, as does the Matilda Effect.
The Matilda Effect—which term Rossitor first used in 1993 – describes the systematic erasure of women’s achievements in science. Rossitor named it in honor of activist, suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage, who sounded the alarm about women being erased a century earlier. And if you’re wondering who that is (I sure did), here’s Gage’s wiki page because the discoveries continue of the many amazing, ground-breaking women who made history, and have been largely forgotten in the process of its recording. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilda_Joslyn_Gage
Rossiter spent decades combing through archives, letters, and forgotten publications, uncovering the stories of women who worked without pay, without recognition, and very often without even the right to put their own names on their own scientific etc. discoveries. Her three-volume Women Scientists in America is more than scholarship—it’s a revolutionary act of restoration. Its creation and compilation is also an act of justice.
Every biography Rossitor found and highlighted placed women at the center of the long scientific story where we have always belonged. She proved that the exclusion of women wasn’t the result of individual failures, but rather of systemic choices and barriers built into the structure of science, mathematics, research, academia, and the larger culture itself.
Rossitor’s research inspired programs and policies that ensure today’s women in STEM are credited, published, and remembered. Her work has provided a framework for those who have worked in STEM, and on the furtherance of women’s rights in all workplaces.
Honors like the Sarton Medal, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Guggenheim recognized her work and scholarship, but perhaps the most fitting tribute is the Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize—awarded to those continuing her mission.
From Wiki, which page is linked below, because this she-ro – and the concepts she developed – are central to today’s conversations around gender and race: “In the early 1980s Margaret Rossiter offered two concepts for understanding the mass of statistics on women in science and the disadvantages women continued to suffer. The first she called hierarchical segregation, the well-known phenomenon that as one moves up the ladder of power and prestige fewer female faces are to be seen. This notion is perhaps more useful than that of the glass ceiling, the supposedly invisible barrier that keeps women from rising to the top, because the notion of hierarchical disparities draws attention to the multiple stages at which women drop off as they attempt to climb academic or industrial ladders. The second concept she offered was “territorial segregation”, how women cluster in scientific disciplines. The most striking example of occupational territoriality used to be that women stayed at home and men went out to work.”
All hail Margaret Rossitor!