Kate Birrell

It’s St Matilda's Day today, patron saint of large families, parents and difficult marriages, so I’m taking this opportunity to post a roll of honour for the women scientists whose achievements were either overlooked or attributed to their male colleagues: the Matilda Effect. Margaret Rossiter, historian, coined the phrase in 1993 and named it for the pioneering suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826-1898) of Cicero, New York, who first identified the phenomenon in her 1883 essay ‘Woman as Inventor’. This list is by no means exhaustive but once you see the Matilda Effect, you see it everywhere. Maria Christina Bruhn (1732-1808) of Stockholm was Sweden's first female inventor in the field of military technology and the first woman anywhere to be granted a patent. In 1780, she invented gunpowder cartridges used by the Swedish Army for several generations but wasn’t awarded the patent until 1786. It took three dogged years of legal action against the man who stole her design and claimed the credit. Margaret Knight (1838-1914) of Maine, the female Edison, held 26 patents for a wide range of inventions but when she tried to register her square-bottomed paper bag in 1870 - a grocery bag still used today - it was too late. In a 19th century case of industrial espionage, a man stole her idea and claimed it. It took a 16-day hearing costing Margaret $100 a day in legal costs (£1832 per day in today’s sterling) but she won. Biologist and geneticist Nettie Stevens (1861-1912) of Vermont discovered the chromosomes we now know as X and Y, and published a research paper in 1905 establishing that XX chromosomes = female and XY = male. The credit went to a man who changed his own research paper to incorporate her findings. A second man was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933 "for his discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosome in heredity" but Nettie only got a posthumous mention. Physicist Lise Meitner (1878-1968) of Vienna, the first woman to become a full professor of physics in Germany, worked out the physics of nuclear fission - she named it - after correctly interpreting the experimental date of her male colleagues but did not share the 1944 Nobel Prize for its discovery. She lost her post as a professor because of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws, her Austrian citizenship because of the Anschluss in 1938. Nominated 49 times for the Physics and Chemistry Nobel Prizes, she never won. Physicist and a pioneer in the field of radioactivity, Marietta Blau (1894-1970) of Vienna, nominated several times for Nobel Prizes in both physics and chemistry, was also forced to flee Austria during the Anschluss. Her innovative use of nuclear emulsions launched the field of particle physics. A man adapted her methods and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1950. Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) of China discovered parity violation which provides a way to operationally define left and right in experimental physics. Her male colleagues were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for her discovery, leading one Nobel laureate to call it “the biggest mistake in the Nobel Committee's history. Chemist and X-Ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) of London, the Dark Lady of DNA, took Photo 51, the first known X-ray image of the double helix, in 1952 and worked out that the structure of DNA had two chains. Two weeks later, Crick and Watson built their now celebrated model of DNA as a double helix after being shown her unpublished evidence without her knowledge. In 1962, they shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology with the man who showed them. Would you like a more recent example of the Matilda Effect? All right then. Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell (born in 1943 in Northern Ireland) discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967 when she was a postgraduate student. Her thesis supervisor was sceptical - but he collected the Nobel Prize in Physics for it in 1974 with another man. The last word goes to Margaret Rossiter: “It is important to note early that women’s historically subordinate ‘place’ in science was not a coincidence and was not due to any lack of merit on their part. It was due to the camouflage intentionally placed over their presence in science.”

Woman of the Day Jane Archer born OTD in 1898 in Bengal, the first woman MI5 officer and for years, in sole charge of MI5’s coverage of Soviet espionage. Her interrogation of a Soviet intelligence defector was masterly, the first really professional debriefing. She unnerved Philby the traitor. What followed was a tangled tale of deceit, suspicion, treachery, disputed facts. What is undisputed is that Jane was just as she was described by the headmistress at her girls’ school in Ealing (she was head girl): "a strong character, very straight, well principled, industrious". It was those qualities that led to her being sacked for “insolence” in November 1940. MI6 snapped her up instead. Jane’s brief career history: recruited in 1916 as a clerk/typist earning 30 shillings a week (£36 in today’s money), a role well below her capabilities; studied law in her spare time, achieved first class exam results, called to the Bar in 1924; promoted through the ranks of MI5, first as Controller of the Registry and then as desk officer leading investigations into Soviet espionage. We’ve all watched first class barristers take apart constructed defences and wilful obfuscation with forensic precision, haven’t we? Now imagine those skills being used during interrogation. In late 1939, Anatol Krivitsky of the NKVD (the Soviet secret police headed by Lavrentiy Beria) defected to the USA. He was brought to London in January 1940 and interrogated by Jane every day for three weeks. Her notes - 85 pages long - were as meticulous as her methods and gave MI5 “its first insight into the machinery of the Russian Secret Service”. Jane learned that NKVD’s long term objective was "to grow up agents from the inside" - sleepers - and would even pay “the expenses of a university education for promising young men in the hope that they might eventually obtain key posts in the service of their own country”. The clues she gleaned about sleepers already in place should have been enough to alert MI5 to the treachery of Donald Maclean, and possibly from him to Kim Philby, but - and you knew there was a ‘but’ coming, didn’t you? - MI5’s DG was incompetent. Jane was too forthright in saying so and was sacked for “insolence” in November 1940. MI6 couldn’t believe its luck. They took Jane on straight away and put her in charge of the Irish Section where it was her job to analyse information about dissident groups. In 1944, she transferred to the Soviet desk. Her Section Leader knew of her capabilities and wrote: “[It] came as a nasty shock…After Guy Liddell, Jane was perhaps the ablest professional intelligence officer ever employed by MI5. She had spent a big chunk of a shrewd lifetime studying Communist activity in all its aspects. It was she who had interrogated General Krivitsky…From him, she had got a tantalising scrap of information about a young English journalist whom the Soviet intelligence had sent to Spain during the Civil War. And here she was pluncked down in my midst!…Jane would have made a very bad enemy.” Oh yes, her Section Leader was that erstwhile English journalist: the traitor Kim Philby. He hobbled her at work, assigning her to monitor radio traffic from Eastern Europe. When Jane began asking difficult questions about Philby’s activities, he dismissed her from MI6. MI5 took her back - it had a new DG - and Jane was assigned to Security Clearance. She warned that “[Klaus] Fuchs is a possible Russian agent…and should be divorced from all contact with atomic energy.” Her warning was unheeded. He was doing exactly as she suspected - spying on the Manhattan Project for the Russians. Jane closed in on the Cambridge Five, prompting Burgess and Maclean to flee to Russia, and found the links that should have alerted the Security Intelligence Services to Philby: the DG of MI6 paid him off with a golden handshake. She traced further links to the traitor John Cairncross (he’d worked at Bletchley Park with Alan Turing, spying on him, prior to joining MI6). He resigned and was given immunity from prosecution. Anthony Blunt, the fifth member of the Cambridge Five was given immunity too but he was publicly unmasked in the House of Commons by another trained barrister using her parliamentary privilege: Margaret Thatcher. And afterwards? Well, you try finding out any publicly available information about Jane. She died in 1982, aged 84.