Matilda Jocelyn Gage    1826-1898    She was referred to as "the woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their time".  She served a term as president of the National Women’s Suffrage Association, and during the Civil War she opened her home to run-away slaves and organized fundraisers for the Union Army.  The term "Matilda Effect" was named in honor of her advocacy for women who were given little or no credit for their contributions to science and other aspects of society.

Emily Roebling    1843-1903    Emily became the 'surrogate chief engineer' of the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge when her husband, W. Roebling, became partially paralyzed, blind, deaf, and mute early in the project.  For almost 13 years, she assumed control of the project: negotiating supply materials, overseeing contracts, and addressing labor strifes. At the bridge’s opening ceremony, many politicians thanked W. Roebling for his contribution to the building of the bridge.  Only one recognized Emily’s efforts by name.

Eunice Newton Foote    1819   -1888    Through careful experimentation she determined that increased CO2 and Water Vapor in the atmosphere results in a warmer planet.  She wrote a paper about it that was presented (by a man) at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in 1856.  This was 3 years before John Tyndall's work resulted with the same conclusions.  He is credited with proving what is now called The Greenhouse Effect.  Eunice is not.

Rosalind  Franklin    1920-1958    Rosalind was the first person to provide photographic evidence of the double helix structure of DNA - which she had deduced herself.  Her data was secretly shown to J. Watson and F. Crick who used it as a basis for their DNA model - for which they received the Nobel Prize in 1962.  Her contribution was not credited.

Jocelyn Bell Bernell    1943-    In 1967 she was the first person to discover pulsars (Neutron stars that emit pulsating radio waves).  She brought the radio wave data to the attention of her advisor, A. Hewish, who dismissed it as man-made interference.  After years of further study with Hewish, the correct origins of the pulses were determined to be Neutron stars.  This important discovery led to the 1974 Nobel Prize awarded to Hewish and a male collaborator.  Not Jocelyn.

Lise Meitner    1878-1968    In 1939 Lise was the first person to describe and coin the term 'Nuclear Fission' in a published scientific paper.  In 1944, a colleague of hers for over 30 years, O. Hahn, was awarded the Nobel prize for the discovery of Nuclear Fission.

Alice Augusta Ball    1892-1916    She developed a unique method of organic extraction (from the Kava root) that isolated the active ingredient.  She was asked if she could use her method to extract the active ingredient from Chaulmoogra Oil.  The oil was believed to cure leprosy but was only marginally effective in its raw state.  She succeeded and created the first effective treatment for leprosy.  One year after her breakthrough, she tragically died (at age 24) and her research was published in A. Dean's name without giving her credit.

Sidonie Gabrielle Colette    1873-1954    During her first marriage Sidonie was kept locked in a room while she wrote the infamous Claudine series of books. Her husband published them under his name and kept the rights (and proceeds) even after they were divorced.  She worked in a music hall for 4 years to make ends meet until she was able to build her own name as a great writer.

Margaret Keane    1927-2022   Her husband Walter hid her away in a back room to paint while he claimed full credit for her work.  The paintings, mostly of waifs with large sad eyes, became a massive trend in the 50's and 60's garnering tens of millions in sales.  They were hung in museums, galleries and private collections all over the world.  Margaret eventually divorced him and tried to claim the credit she was due.  She famously won a defamation suit after a 'paint-off' between her and Walter ordered by a judge.  He claimed his arm hurt that day.  She was awarded a large settlement, but he declared bankruptcy and didn't pay.

Elizabeth Magie    1866-1948    Elizabeth created 'The Landlords Game' as a critique of capitalism.  She received a patent for it in 1904 and became a mild success.  Years later, C. Darrow came across the game at a friend's party.  He modified it and sold the rights to Parker Brothers in 1935 under the name Monopoly.  After public outcry, G. Parker met with Elizabeth and negotiated a deal to produce her version of the game and give her credit for inventing Monopoly.   Parker never produced her game nor did he give her credit.  Darrow made millions.  She died in relative obscurity.

Mileva Maric    1875-1948    Based on letters and interviews with people who knew the couple, Einstein's wife Mileva (who had been his classmate for four years in Math and Physics) collaborated with him through 1914 - including on the theory of relativity.  In many letters between them, the work was referred to as 'our work'.  Though they eventually divorced (after he began an affair with his cousin) he gave Mileva the money from the 1921 Nobel Prize he was awarded.  She has been given almost no public credit.

Hedy Lamarr    1914-2000    Hedy was one of the most famously attractive actresses of all time.  To help the effort in WWII, and specifically to keep enemies from jamming U.S. torpedoes, she and G. Anthiel created and patented a revolutionary device that sent targeting instructions by signals that frequency-hopped.  She was told that she could best help the Allies' mission by showing her beautiful face during USO appearances.  In the mean time, the Navy classified her patent as 'top secret', seized it, and didn't act on it until the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.  Since then, her technique has been credited as a foundational element of Bluetooth, WiFi, cellphone and GPS communications.  Lamar and Antheil were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame 14 years after her death.

Esther Lederberg    1922-2006    Esther was a groundbreaking biogeneticist who discovered the virus 'F factor plasmid', and a bacterial replica plating method that revolutionized the studies of bacteria and genetics.  She wrote 3 scientific papers about this subject before meeting her husband J. Lederberg in the same field of research.  They joined forces and coauthored 12 papers, but her husband was given most credit for the work.  In textbooks it was his name associated with replica plating, and he received a 1958 Nobel Prize.  Esther did not.

Chien Shiung Wu    1912-1997    Known as 'The First Lady of Physics', she was recruited to work on the Manhattan project and became known for her discoveries in the enrichment of Uranium.  She was later recruited by TD Lee and CN Yang to develop an experiment to help disprove a physics law known as the Parity Law.  They had theorized that the law was incorrect but needed her to prove it.  She did make the proof but was overlooked by the Nobel Committee who awarded the men a Nobel prize in 1957.

Catharine Littlefield Greene    1755-1814    After the revolutionary war Catharine, a widow and plantation owner, rented a room to Eli Whitney, a recent college graduate who had come south to find a teaching position.  She presented him with the problems of trying to separate the cotton from its seeds.  She contributed to the design of the machine, paid for its development, and financed the patent in 1794.  At that time no patents had ever been issued to a woman so the application was filed with Eli’s name.  Eli made it into history books.  Catherine did not.

Jeanne Baret    1740-1807    Jeanne was the first woman to sail around the world - but due to rules forbidding women on French naval vessels, she had to disguise herself as a man.  She was hired as an assistant botanist on a globe circling voyage along with P. Commerçon, who was tasked with collecting new plant species.  Her gender was eventually discovered and she and her companion were dropped off in Mauritius.  He died there and she returned to France, completing her circumnavigation. They collected over 6,000 plant specimens during the voyage and identified numerous new species including Bougainvillea.   For the rest of her life, her very real scientific achievements were overshadowed by salacious stories of her gender deception on that voyage.

Mary Whiton Calkins    1863-1930    Mary was recognized for her brilliance in the late 1800s.  She received her undergraduate degree at Smith College and was given a unique allowance to attend lectures and seminars at Harvard, which was an all male school.  She passed all of the requirements for a PhD in Psychology and even wrote and defended her dissertation.  She was voted unanimously by a panel of 6 faculty to be recognized with a doctorate degree but the Harvard Administration refused due to their rules prohibiting postgraduate degrees for women.  She blazed on and continued her research.  In time, she was elected as the American Psychological Association’s first female president.   Harvard continues to refuse to grant her the doctorate posthumously - though they've been petitioned multiple times.

Marthe Gautier    1925-2022    Marthe was robbed of credit for her discovery that people afflicted with Down Syndrome have an extra chromosome set.  Her lab equipment allowed her to see enough to determine that the extra set was present, but she wanted more detail.  She sent the slides to J. Lejeune to photograph at a higher resolution.  After hearing nothing she was shocked to learn of a paper published 6 months later announcing the discovery.  He was listed as the primary author.  Though she fought to receive her due credit, Lejeune was the more famous researcher and received backing from the scientific community. 

Frieda Robscheit Robbins    1888-1973    Working with GH Whipple she made groundbreaking discoveries in the study of anemia and liver therapy - coauthoring 9 of 23 studies on liver therapy and hemoglobin between 1920-1933.  Whipple was later honored with a Nobel Prize.  She was not.  Whipple himself acknowledged the importance of her work and shared the money from the prize with her.

Martha Chase    1927-2003    She worked with famed biologist A. Hershey to better understand the mechanism by which genes pass between organisms.  He and most scientists in the field believed genetic material was part of a collection of proteins rather than DNA.  She helped design a method of isolating the proteins and used this technique to prove that genes were in the DNA.  This massive milestone in the field of genetic studies became known as the Hershey-Chase experiment.  Hershey later received a Nobel Prize for this work.  She did not.  Hershey didn't recognize her contributions, as would be customary, during his acceptance speech. 

Fanny Mendelssohn    1805-1847    She and her brother Felix were considered musical prodigies, comparable by some to Mozart.  Her father told her when she was 14 to abandon ideas of becoming a composer or musician in favor of becoming a proper wife.  She acquiesced but continued to compose privately and perform occasional concerts for friends, which included the likes of Chopin and Paganini. She was highly regarded within the upper echelon of the musical community, but was essentially unknown to the public.  Felix went on to become a massively famous composer.  Some of her works did make it to the public - under Felix's name.  He is forever remembered as a great composer.  Fanny has mostly been forgotten.

Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin    1900-1979    For her doctoral thesis at Harvard, she proposed that the stars were composed primarily of Hydrogen and Helium.  She was ridiculed and pressured to change her ultimate conclusion in the thesis in order to graduate.  Later, it was discovered that her ideas were correct, but credit was given to N. Russell.  He was initially one of her most preeminent detractors (to whom she had shown her findings).  She fought on.  Four years later, credit was given to her.  She eventually became chair of the Harvard School of Astronomy.

Hatshepsut    1505 BC-1458 BC    She was a powerful Pharaoh for 2 decades and one of Egypt's most prolific in large scale construction projects.   Her husband, the Pharaoh Thutmose II, died in his 20s.  She initially assumed the role of regent due to the heir apparent, her stepson Thutmose III, being 2 years old.  She soon realized that to effectively rule at the time, she had to take on the role of a male king and therefore claimed the title 'Pharaoh'.  When her stepson came of sufficient age, she stepped aside and let him rule.  He (and others) later destroyed almost all evidence of her and wrote her out of the official lineage.

Margaret Ann Bulkley    1795-1865    At a time when women were not allowed to practice medicine, Margaret pretended to be a man named James Barry to eventually become one of Britain's greatest surgeons.  Always maintaining her ruse, she worked her way up through the ranks of the Army and finally became inspector general of hospitals, the highest rank possible in the medical realm.  Her secret was unearthed after her death.

Camille Claudel    1864-1943    She was a prodigy of sculpture, but the French Academies refused to accept a woman as a student.  The great Rodin heard of her abilities and invited her to become his protégé - and his lover.  She worked on a number of his sculptures and there's evidence that she even inspired his evolution as an artist.  She also continued to create her own sculptures which were critically acclaimed at the highest levels. After a terrible breakup with Rodin, she was left penniless and in an awful mix of misogyny and fear of hysteria, she was committed against her will to an insane asylum for 30 years until her death.

Elizabeth Hauptmann    1897-1973    Elizabeth was one of many of B. Brecht's mistresses, secretaries and collaborators.  He was a celebrated German playwright, credited with a wide collection of plays.  Evidence shows that much of the work was actually done by the women he seduced and hired as his assistants.  Of these, Elizabeth was the most prominent and prolific.  She was a talented author in her own right but was not given credit during his lifetime.  Her name has since appeared as coauthor of a number of these plays.

Sacagawea    1788-1812    History books often portray a romantic view of her role in the Lewis and Clark expedition.  In fact Sacagawea was enslaved, brutalized, and raped.  She was taken as a slave by the Hidatsa tribe when she was 11.  She was then given to a visiting trapper for a gambling debt when she was 12 or 13.  He raped her and when invited onto the expedition (she was pregnant), he received a fee from Lewis and Clark for her services as a translator.  She was paid nothing for her 1.5 years of work on the extreme expedition as a teenage slave with a baby either in her belly or on her back - and nursing an awful case of venereal disease that Lewis believed she contracted from the trapper.

Harper Lee    1926-2016    Just after Harper Lee completed the manuscript of To Kill A Mockingbird, her childhood friend Truman Capote asked her to help him with his book In Cold Blood.  She traveled for months with him and wrote at least 150 pages of notes.  He gave her no public credit for the work she did.  After Harper received the Pulitzer Prize, he did little to dispel the rampant rumor that he was the true author of Mockingbird.  This led to decades of controversy over authorship.  In 2017 a letter from Truman to his aunt was discovered clearly stating his relationship to Mockingbird and the authorship.  Harper Lee wrote it. 

Alice Catherine Evans    1881-1975    Alice was the first person to identify that a disease carried by cows was related to a disease in humans - and that drinking unpasteurized milk could lead to a transmission of the disease.  The idea that a disease could be transmitted from animals to humans was ridiculed and she was shunned by the scientific community.  She was not deterred and continued her research and ultimately proved herself as a groundbreaking scientist.  She eventually became the first woman president of the American Society of Microbiology.

Henrietta Leavitt    1868-1921    Henrietta, a “human computer” at the Harvard College Observatory, discovered the period-luminosity relationship between individual stars and signal wave frequency. Her work is key to calculating interstellar distances, known as Leavitt's Law, and became the groundbreaking basis for the understanding that the universe is much larger than just the milky way.  Edwin Hubble and Harlow Shapley both became massively famous for their conclusions based on their extension of her foundational work.  She did not.

Harriet Zuckerman    1937-    Harriet is most remembered for her 1977 book 'Scientific Elite: Nobel Laureates' which documented ways in which women scientists were "systematically disadvantaged in educational attainment, productivity, funding, lab space, and recognition".  This argument became the basis for the term Matilda Effect.  Ironically, earlier in her career she provided the research for the R Melton paper in which he coined the term Matthew Effect.  She was not given her due recognition for her contribution until many years after.

Artemisia Gentileschi    1593-1654    Artemisia was the daughter of a respected painter, O. Gentileschi, and followed in his style.  She was the first woman to be allowed to join the Florentine Academy of design. After her death she was all but forgotten and many of her early works were attributed to her father.  It was not until the 20th century that she received full credit and critical acclaim for her work.  In fact, when compared to her father, her work is generally regarded as superior.

Nettie Stevens    1861-1912    Nettie was the first to discover that sex determination was through genes (specifically through a set of chromosomes) rather than from environmental factors.  This discovery fundamentally changed biology. A prominent male scientist published a similar (though less correct) finding at the same time and received credit for the discovery.    It wasn't until historian Steven Brush published an article in 1978 that fully described the efforts and chain of events during that period that Nettie was finally given her due credit.  She had died 64 years earlier.

Emmy  Noether    1882-1935    As a woman in early 1900s Germany, Emmy wasn't allowed to enroll in university.  By auditing classes and acing exams, her genius was noticed however, and she was eventually granted an advanced degree in Mathematics and invited to research and lecture - without pay for 4 years.  She continued her research and made important discoveries in abstract algebra and ring theory.  Applying her mathematical genius to physics, she developed the Noether theorems which showed links between mass, energy and time.  These theorems became the basis for many later discoveries in particle physics.  She was hailed by Albert Einstein as "the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced".

Margaret Knight    1838-1914    After working at a paper bag company, Margaret wanted to design a machine that could cut, fold, and assemble a paper bag automatically.  While contracting a machine shop to build a prototype she had designed, one of the men at the shop, C. Annan, secretly applied for the patent in his name and was awarded it.  She sued and won.  Annan's defense was that a “woman could not possibly understand the mechanical complexities of the machine.”  All of her documents and testimony proved conclusively otherwise.

Laura Bassi    1711-1778    Known as a prodigy in math and science when she was young, she was the first woman to receive a PhD in Bologna (1732).  As a woman though, she had to defend her thesis in a rare public setting that became a spectacle.  She went on to defend another 12 theses and was awarded an honorary post at the University of Bologna as a physics professor (the first of its kind for a woman).  She was severely limited in ways the male professors weren't.  For instance, she was allowed to lecture roughly once per year.  She began to teach and run a lab out of her house, authoring 28 papers on physics and hydraulics.  She was eventually appointed to the chair of experimental physics at the University in 1776.