Matilda effect

The Matilda effect is a type of bias. The Matilda effect is when a woman scientist does something but people think a man scientist did it. Sometimes people do this on purpose, for example when a professor steals a female student's research and puts his own name on the paper. Sometimes people do this without thinking about it.
History.
Suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–98) was the first person to write about this effect. She wrote an essay, "Woman as Inventor." It was first published as a tract in 1870 and in the "North American Review" in 1883. The term "Matilda effect" was started in 1993 by science historian Margaret W. Rossiter.
Rossiter wrote about several times the Matilda effect had happened in real life. Trotula (Trota of Salerno), a 12th-century Italian woman physician, wrote books which, after her death, were rewritten with male authors' names on them. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century cases of the Matilda effect include those of Nettie Stevens, Lise Meitner, Marietta Blau, Rosalind Franklin, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell.
Comparison.
The Matilda effect was compared to the Matthew effect. The Matthew effect is when a famous scientist gets more credit than a less famous scientist even if they both did the same work.
Research.
In 2012, two woman researchers from Radboud University Nijmegen did a study. They looked at men and women who were being picked to be professors at universities. They found the people choosing who would become a professor were affected by whether the person they were looking at was a man or a woman. Another study in Italy Italian and another in Spain showed the same thing.
However, some other studies found no difference between the number of times men and woman researchers' papers had been named as sources in other papers.
Swiss researchers found that when people in mass media, for example newscasters, want to put a scientist on their show, they talk to male scientists more than to female scientists.
According to one U.S. study, "although overt gender discrimination generally continues to decline in American society," "women continue to be disadvantaged with respect to the receipt of scientific awards and prizes, particularly for research."
Examples.
Examples of women to whom to the Matilda effect happened:
Times men scientists had Nobel Prizes when women scientists did not:
Other.
Ben Barres (1954–2017), a neurobiologist at Stanford University Medical School. Barres is a trans man, meaning Barres was raised with a female gender role. He began to live as a man when he was 42 years old. Barres said people thought his research was better when they thought he was a man than when they thought he was a woman. Someone even said "His work is much better that his sister's" because they thought "Barbara Barres" was his sister and not his own old name. This is one time when the Matilda effect worked on the same person at different times in that person's life.