Erasing women from history

Women’s work has historically been credited to men simply because it could be – the patriarchy is designed to benefit men after all. There’s also the fact that it would be taken more seriously in the scientific, artistic or linguistic community if it was put forward with by lines belonging to men, as male gatekeepers perceive work by them to be more credible. And for women who had landed on discoveries they believed that sharing the life changing information with the world was more important than taking credit for it.

But erasure of women is dangerous. If we don’t know that women were responsible for or contributed to these scientific breakthroughs or defining pieces of art, how do we teach young women that they too can strive to do the same? Hidden figures in science mean that at school I was taught about the inventions of Alexander Fleming, Thomas Edison, Stephen Hawking, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, but the only female scientist I can tell you about is Marie Curie (I can also tell you that that her husband helped her with the research, but I wasn’t taught anything about Edison’s wives). Let’s also take a second to think about how easily those names rolled off of my fingers as I wrote this, with the world having such high regard for their work that most of the time they’re simply referred to by their last name. Marie Curie is never just referenced as Curie.

The Matilda Effect: the brilliant women whose achievements were erased from history by men