On Tuesday, August 12, the Moon aligns between the Earth and the Sun, completely covering the Sun’s disk and darkening the sky without it being night. The Earth's satellite takes the centre stage during the day (something extraordinary) blocking the Sun’s light and becoming omnipresent for a few moments. Something that, as a metaphor for science, hundreds of women scientists have experienced throughout the centuries.
To mark this day, we have selected twelve women whose light was eclipsed by their male colleagues, reinforcing what the historian of science Margaret W. Rossiter described as the Matilda Effect, named after the American suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage. This is the historical and contemporary gender bias that minimises the achievements of women scientists, often attributing their discoveries to husbands or male peers.
One of the most iconic cases is Rosalind Franklin, a chemist and crystallographer who, in 1952, captured the famous “Photograph 51”, the evidence that revealed the double-helix structure of the DNA. These images were shown without her consent by James Watson and Francis Crick, who not only benefited from her data by publishing their findings in Nature, but also received the Nobel Prize in 1962, while Franklin was completely excluded from recognition.
In the shadows of the Nobel Prizes
Only 3% of Nobel Prizes have been awarded to women. The silence in this area of recognition is striking, and many women have been eclipsed on this stage. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astrophysicist, discovered pulsars, the neutron stars that emit periodic radiation, in 1967, while analysing data from a radio telescope that she herself had helped build. Yet, the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics for that discovery was awarded to her supervisor, Antony Hewish, and to the astronomer Martin Ryle, leaving her in the shadows. Hewish even argued that giving the prize to a PhD student would have “devalued” the awards.
Lise Meitner, considered the mother of nuclear fission, studied under Max Planck (despite his belief that women should not attend university) and worked alongside Otto Hahn, who was paid while she worked without a salary. Meitner provided the correct theoretical explanation for the phenomenon, but Hahn alone received the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, despite both having been nominated together in 1939. Hahn did not mention her in his acceptance speech, and today the chemical element 109, Meitnerium, bears her name.
The theoretical colleagues of experimental physicist Chien-Shiung Wu also collected a Nobel Prize from the Swedish Academy in 1957, while her crucial experimental work was overlooked. Wu made it possible to demonstrate that the law of parity conservation was false in weak interactions, a major breakthrough in particle physics.
Joshua Lederberg, husband of Esther Lederberg (the pioneering microbiologist who discovered bacterial transduction and developed key techniques in genetics) received a Nobel Prize in 1958 without proper recognition of his wife’s essential contribution. A similar eclipse affected geneticist Nettie Stevens, who discovered the X and Y chromosomes through her studies of mealworm beetles. As she was reaching her conclusions, her supervisor published similar findings and received the recognition of the scientific community, as well as the Nobel honours. Something very similar happened to Isabella Karle, the crystallographer whose scientific contributions helped her husband and a mathematician colleague receive the highest distinction in chemistry. Both the laureates and members of the scientific community acknowledged that she deserved the same recognition, but it changed nothing.
The Nobel Prizes are well known for overlooking women. It is said that when someone proposed recognising Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the astronomer whose work provided the key to measure distance between stars, she had already been dead for four years. Today, a crater on the Moon bears her name. And this would be merely anecdotal if it had not happened to brilliant minds such as Williamina Fleming, Leavitt’s colleague at the Harvard College Observatory. She was initially hired as a housemaid but went on to catalogue more than 10,000 stars and discover over 300 variable stars, 10 novae and 52 nebulae.
Among all these hidden injustices, however, one of the most striking is surely the one faced by Mileva Marić, physicist, mathematician and close collaborator of perhaps the most famous scientist of all: Albert Einstein. Marić was not only his first wife; in his letters Einstein referred to their work as something done “together”, yet he later signed alone every paper from his “miracle year” of 1905.
Competing on unequal terms
History has preserved stories that reveal the precarious conditions (often financial as well as professional) faced by women who chose to dedicate their lives to science. One example is Maria Winkelmann-Kirch, the first woman to discover a comet, who gave the credit to her husband because, legally, she was considered only his assistant. Another is Gerty Cori, the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Although she shared the award with her husband and an Argentine physiologist, the Swedish Academy split the prize money into two parts, including her in the honour but excluding her from an equal share of the financial reward.
And there are many more. Hundreds of names (like Agnes Pockels, Ada Lovelace, Florence Bascom, Emmy Noether, or even Hypatia, whose year of birth remains uncertain) along with countless of stories and circumstances that have contributed, and continue to contribute, to the obscuring of scientific discoveries made by women. And while the light of the Sun hides behind the presence of the Moon, let this August 12 be an opportunity to look up at the sky and remember that science cannot afford to keep eclipsing the talent of women.
