As a result of the Matilda Effect, Uzma Khan is not as well-known as she should be for her work in animal conservation, specifically of the Indus River dolphin.
Image credit:The Matilda Project
To this day, Shehroze Saharan vividly remembers the moment when his 11th grade biology teacher asked the class to open their textbook to the section on the discovery of the structure of DNA and to read what was written there.
“I remember, we all went through the story of how Watson, Crick, and Wilkins discovered the shape of the double helix,” said Saharan, who is the managing director of The Matilda Project. “He told us there’s actually another person who is part of this story, whose name you won’t see in the textbook, and that’s Rosalind Franklin whose work was taken from her [and] not credited appropriately…That really stuck with me.”
That experience, paired with a college assignment in digital humanities, inspired Saharan and his design lead brother Shehryar Saharan, to co-found The Matilda Project, an online educational resource that uses art and storytelling to highlight women in STEM whose work has gone unnoticed or ignored. By spotlighting these women, they hope to raise awareness of and combat gender bias in STEM.
The Matilda Effect
In her 1883 essay titled, “Woman as an Inventor,” Matilda Joslyn Gage, an abolitionist and suffragist, described how society has consistently overlooked women’s contributions to scientific and technological advances.1 About a century later, Margaret Rossiter, who was a science historian at Cornell University, coined the term the Matilda Effect after Gage and the phenomenon she described in her essay.2
Saharan was in his fourth year of his undergraduate studies at the University of Guelph when he learned about the Matilda Effect. At the time, he was taking a course in digital humanities and needed to complete a capstone project that related to his major in biomedical sciences. It was from this assignment that the idea for The Matilda Project was born.
When he told his brother about the idea, the two decided that they had to turn Saharan’s class project into a reality. After receiving some funding from the government of Ontario, the education non-profit eCampus Ontario, and the University of Guelph, the two began compiling a list of female researchers to feature.
“Our inclusion criteria are really just looking at: What is the Matilda Effect? Was this person denied some sort of credit? What are their scientific accomplishments, and why isn’t their story more well recognized? We do have a list, I believe, of over 190 different people,” he said. While finding so many female scientists to feature so quickly is great for their initiative, Saharan said that it’s really a double-edged sword. “It’s so disheartening to see that in three years, we were able to find so easily a list of 190 people.”
Marie Maynard Daly, pictured here, was a biochemist and the first African American woman to earn a PhD in chemistry in the United States.
The Matilda Project
While identifying the women to feature was a quick process, finding enough information about some of them has been a challenge—simply by the nature of the Matilda Effect.
“There are lots of readings about Rosalind Franklin. She’s like that poster child, unfortunately, for the Matilda Effect,” Saharan said. But for more obscure figures like Uzma Khan, who was the first person to track the Indus River dolphin, information is much scarcer. “That work is incredible, and it always boggles my mind that being able to find that type of information is always so difficult,” he said.
The Matilda Effect is Not Just a Relic of the Past
In addition to featuring female scientists from history, Saharan stressed the importance of spotlighting current female scientists who experience the Matilda Effect still today.
“You’d be surprised to hear the amount of people that I’ve run into that tell me, ‘Oh, [The Matilda Project] is really interesting, but why are you doing that? It doesn’t happen anymore.’ Which I think is always a really interesting response, and nine times out of 10 [times] that response I do get is coming from men in positions of power, which is unfortunate to see,” he said.
Because of this misconception, the Saharan brothers make sure that they feature both historical and modern-day women, those working in a variety of disciplines, and women from different backgrounds and locations.
They hope that as they add more female scientists to their website that The Matilda Project can serve as a resource for the academic community, from undergraduates to faculty. They encourage anyone interested in volunteering to write about these scientists or illustrate their lives to reach out.
Saharan said, “We want to bring people onto the project, help educate, and bring light to the stories that have been hidden for generations and the things that are still happening today.”