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

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.

Hostile environment

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 Her unpublished analytical data, which contained specific measurements relevant to the structure of DNA, was the confirmation the Cambridge model needed, and which established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.

Cause of equity

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.

Even today, despite numerous initiatives, the representation of women in STEM fields remains persistently low, indicating that funding schemes and mentorship programmes alone don’t dismantle the patriarchal mindset.A newer, more insidious issue arises when men publiclycongratulate themselves for “giving women the opportunity”or “supporting women in science”, in the process exposing a flawed belief in their own superiority and authority over women’s professional agency. This patronising attitude often translates into women’s vital contributions being overshadowed by their male colleagues in collaborative work.

The excellence of Franklin, Meitner, Bell Burnell, and Manade Wu shows that women can excel on their own merit, and that what is required is not an opportunity to perform granted by gatekeepers but genuine acceptance as equals.Weneed to stop measuring progress by the number of programmes introduced and instead cultivate a truly gender-neutral mindset, where credit flows based on evidence and contributions alone.

Indeed, the greatest tribute we can pay to this generation of scientists is to ensure every mind, regardless of gender, receives the credit it is due, and that work is protected from the kind of opportunism that characterised the double helix saga. It’s time we unequivocally consider Rosalind Franklin an equal contributor and a martyr to the cause of equity in science.

Riddhi Datta is a molecular biologist and assistant professor in the Post-graduate Department of Botany, Barasat Government College, Barasat, West Bengal.