Matilda Effect
A bias against acknowledging the achievements of those women scientists whose work is attributed to their male colleagues.
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Origin
In 1870, suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage published her pamphlet Woman as Inventor, protesting the systematic erasure of women's contributions to science and invention. Over a century later, science historian Margaret W. Rossiter named the pattern after Gage in her 1993 paper "The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science" in Social Studies of Science, framing it as the counterpart to the Matthew effect.
Updated February 22, 2026