Patriarchy, the Matilda effect, and the erasure of women in STEM Premium

Explore the impact of patriarchy and the Matilda effect on women's contributions to STEM, highlighting Rosalind Franklin's overlooked legacy.

While the death of James Watson on November 6, 2025, closed a famous chapter in the history of DNA, it also opened a necessary conversation about who we choose to remember, how, and why. The discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA remains a scientific triumph but it’s also a cautionary tale of how the Matilda effect allowed male colleagues to co-opt the analytical work of Rosalind Franklin. To truly champion women in STEM now, we must first dismantle the patriarchal narratives that came before.

Watson and Francis Crick are widely credited with defining the structure of life itself. Their 1953 model was a scientific breakthrough of the highest order — but the Nobel Prize they received in 1962 erased Franklin’s contributions. This wasn’t an isolated incident but the product of a system designed to exploit the labour of women scientists.

Franklin was a brilliant physical chemist and X-ray crystallographer at King’s College London and the experimentalist who produced the clinching evidence. Her work yielded two forms of the DNA molecule, ‘A’ and ‘B’. Traditional lore holds that the decisive moment came when Watson saw a particular image (numbered 51), that gave away the double helix structure.  The injustice however wasn’t the mere viewing of the photograph but the disregard for Franklin’s entire contribution. Her unpublished analytical data, which contained specific measurements relevant to the structure of DNA, was the confirmation the Cambridge model needed, and which established her as an equal contributor to the discovery.

Watson’s 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, cemented the historical narrative by offering a disparaging, even gossipy portrayal of Franklin, casting her as difficult and resistant to collaboration. Such caricatures are the mechanisms by which patriarchal systems invalidate female expertise. By focusing on her personality rather than her science, Watson ignored her true intellectual contributions: Franklin was the first to clearly differentiate the ‘A’ and ‘B’ forms of DNA, and she independently deduced that its structure had antiparallel strands.

Her tragedy ultimately was that she was working in a hostile environment where her status was ambiguous and her work didn’t receive the same respect as that of her male colleagues. Thus one man’s brash hypothesis won more weight than a woman’s exhaustive, foundational data.

Her story is one chapter in a longer, systemic history of erasure. Lise Meitner, whose physical explanation of nuclear fission provided the theoretical basis for the 1944 chemistry Nobel Prize, was omitted in favour of her male collaborator, Otto Hahn. Nettie Stevens performed the fundamental work on sex determination yet her male peer Edmund Beecher Wilson has often received more historical credit for the discovery. Then of course are Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who as a graduate student discovered the first pulsars, and Chien-Shiung Wu, whose experiment proved that our universe doesn’t conserve parity. All these stories embody the Matilda effect, whereby the achievements of female scientists are systematically overlooked or co-opted by and credited to their male colleagues. Franklin wasn’t simply one “wronged heroine” but a representative figure.