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Name five famous scientists. Einstein, Newton, Darwin, Pasteur, Galileo. Now, name five women scientists. Marie Curie? And then? This pause shows the Matilda Effect.

This problem means that women's discoveries are often ignored or given to male colleagues instead. The name honors Matilda Joslyn Gage, a women's rights activist. In 1883, she spoke out about men taking credit for women's ideas. In 1993, historian Margaret Rossiter studied this problem. She built on the work of Robert Merton from the 1960s. He had found that one person often gets all the credit for a discovery, leaving out their team. Rossiter showed that this problem is much worse for women. In the early 1900s, Calkins changed how we understand memory. She created the paired learning method. She showed that bright things are easier to remember. She also showed that seeing something many times is most important. These ideas are still true today.

In 1895, she passed all her tests for a doctorate at Harvard. A group of six professors, including the famous William James, all voted yes. But Harvard still said no and refused to give her the degree. Other psychologists quickly started using her method. But slowly, her name disappeared from their work. Today, Google Scholar shows 368,000 results about this method. But her original work has only been mentioned 200 times. That's only 0.05%.

Even though people recognized her work while she was alive, today she is remembered as the woman Harvard refused. She is not remembered as the scientist who discovered basic facts about memory.