History Has a Memory Problem
How the Matilda Effect shapes what history remembers, who they remember and who is left out while their contributions are associated to another.

I learned about scientists the way most students do: through repetition. Albert Einstein. Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin. 

Their names appeared so often they stopped sounding like people and began to feel inevitable, proof that history had already decided who mattered.

It wasn’t until a sixth-grade field trip to the local movie theatre to watch Hidden Figures (2016) directed by Theodore Melfi that I noticed who was missing.

The afternoon was supposed to feel like a reward; a break from class. Sticky theatre floors, teachers counting heads in the aisles, the heavy sweetness of popcorn. The lights dim and I remember thinking I would probably not remember the movie afterwards.

Then, in the middle of it, something shifted.

Katherine Johnson recalculated flight trajectories by hand when engineers no longer trusted the computer’s numbers. Mary Jackson was petitioning a court for permission to attend an engineering program that did not want her there due to her race and gender. Dorothy Vaughan was teaching herself FORTRAN, understanding that the new machines would soon replace the human computing unit she led.

And then the feeling hit me. Awe, then undeniable anger. 

These women were shaping history, solving problems that determined whether astronauts lived or died, and I was hearing their names for the first time while sitting in a movie theatre on a school trip. I remember thinking very clearly, how is this the first time anyone had ever said these names out loud to me?

Years later, I learned that there is a term historians use for this pattern: The Matilda Effect. Coined in 1993 by science historian Margaret W. Rossiter, the phrase describes how women’s scientific contributions are frequently credited to male colleagues or supervisors instead. Rossiter named the phenomenon after Matilda Joslyn Gage, a nineteenth-century suffragist and writer, who in her pamphlet Woman as Inventor argued that women inventors and thinkers were frequently erased from history not because they lacked achievement, but because society struggled to see them as intellectual authorities.

This theory assigned language to something I had already absorbed without noticing.

Later that year, still in sixth grade,  my class did an exercise. We were asked to draw a police officer, a firefighter, a doctor, a nurse, a teacher, and an assistant. There were no instructions beyond the list. Some students finished quickly, while others erased and redrew faces, trying to make them look right.

When we compared the drawings, nobody needed to point anything out, authority figures were mostly men. Support roles were mostly women, no one had taught us this directly. We had learnt it through exposure, repetition and through the accumulation of examples seen on TV and in real life.

We are not overtly taught who does or doesn’t belong. But our assumptions are slowly, shaped by the people we see over and over again. The same names repeat over and over again in textbooks and lectures, and eventually they seem like the only ones that matter. When people are missing from that story the absence doesn’t feel noticeable, it just feels normal.

And the pattern is not limited to science, it appears identically across cultures and the arts. Composer Fanny Mendelssohn published some of her work under her brother’s name. Painter Lee Krasner was introduced for years primarily as the wife of Jackson Pollock, even while producing work now recognised as central to abstract expressionism. Recognition followed visibility rather than contribution. 

The more you notice it, the stranger history begins to feel. Breakthroughs taught as stories of lone geniuses begin to look crowded. Collaboration seems to always appear where individuality was once emphasised. 

What unsettled me the most after watching Hidden Figures (2016) wasn’t the anger itself, but realising that recognition shapes imagination. If you never see people like you attached to discovery, authority, or even intelligence, you do not consciously decide you don’t belong, you simply stop picturing yourself there. 

Correcting the record is not only about rediscovering forgotten names decades later. It’s about teaching them from the beginning, placing their work alongside the names we already know, so recognition does not arrive too late to make a difference.

That may be why conversations about the Matilda Effect feel different now, especially among students. We are not only rediscovering overlooked women. We are beginning to notice how narratives form in real time, whose ideas get remembered after group projects, whose contributions quietly fade into the background.

The unsettling part is realising this is not only about the past.

Somewhere right now, someone is doing essential work that will eventually belong to someone else’s story.

History very rarely announces when it leaves someone out. It just keeps repeating certain names until they are the only ones we learn to recognise.