Meet the Lost Women of Science: The Long Work of Giving Credit Back

In 1929, a large earthquake struck near New Zealand and sent shock waves rolling through the body of the planet. In Copenhagen, a seismologist named Inge Lehmann sat down with the readings and found something that should not have been there. Waves were turning up at stations where the accepted model of the Earth said they could not possibly arrive. Most of us can name the men who split the atom or mapped the double helix. Rather fewer can name the woman who worked out what is at the centre of the world.

The woman who found the centre of the Earth

Lehmann’s explanation, published in 1936 in a paper titled simply “P′”, was that those stray waves had travelled into the core and bounced off a boundary within it. The Earth, she argued, has a solid inner core sitting inside a molten outer one. It was a radical claim from a scientist who once described herself, not entirely as a joke, as the only seismologist in Denmark.

The scientific establishment took its time. The influential geophysicist Harold Jeffreys remained unconvinced until 1939, and full confirmation did not arrive until 1970, when more sensitive seismographs picked up waves deflecting off exactly the boundary she had described. It is now called the Lehmann discontinuity, and it sits roughly 5,100 kilometres beneath your feet.

Recognition, when it came, came late. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1969, became the first woman to receive the William Bowie Medal in 1971, and collected the Seismological Society of America’s Medal in 1977, aged 89. She died in 1993 at 104. There is an asteroid named after her, and a beetle.

A name for the problem

Lehmann is not an isolated case, and there is a term for the pattern she fits into. The historian Margaret Rossiter coined the Matilda effect to describe the systematic under-recognition of women’s scientific work, and the tendency for their findings to be filed under a male colleague’s name. She named it for Matilda Joslyn Gage, the nineteenth-century suffragist who noticed the same thing happening in her own lifetime.

Rossiter had personal reasons to look. As a graduate student at Yale in 1969, she asked a room of professors whether there had ever been any women scientists. They told her there had not. It is the counterpart to what the sociologist Robert Merton called the Matthew effect, in which credit for shared work drifts upwards towards whoever is already most famous. The Matilda effect is that same drift, with gender doing the sorting.

This is not only history

The comforting version of this story ends with the twentieth century. The evidence does not entirely cooperate. A large 2022 study in Nature, led by Matthew Ross, examined research teams, their output and who ended up being credited for it. Women on those teams were significantly less likely than their male colleagues to be named as authors on a given paper or as inventors on a patent. The finding held across three separate data sources, though it has not gone unchallenged: a published comment argues the effect is far stronger in some fields than others, and that the headline framing flattens important variation.

The prize data is blunter. Since 1901, only around 20 women have won Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine and economics, out of nearly 700 awarded. In 2024 there were no female science laureates at all. In 2025, immunologist Mary Brunkow shared the medicine prize for work on how the immune system avoids attacking the body it lives in.

The everyday record shows it too. Only about 15 per cent of London’s blue plaques commemorate women. Roughly 19 per cent of biographies on English-language Wikipedia are about women, in any field at all.

The people doing the retrieving

Here is the more hopeful part. Retrieval has become an organised project, and quite a lot of it is happening right now.

The Lost Women of Science Initiative, a non-profit founded by former New York Times reporter Katie Hafner and bioethicist Amy Scharf, has built a podcast around exactly this work, distributed by PRX in partnership with Scientific American. Each season reconstructs one life in full: paediatrician Dorothy Andersen, programmer Klára Dán von Neumann, engineer Yvonne Y. Clark. A mini-series covered the women of the Manhattan Project, more than 640 of whom worked at Los Alamos alone, making up 11 per cent of the workforce there. The current season, Layers of Brilliance, follows the materials scientist Katharine Burr Blodgett, who arrived at General Electric’s Schenectady laboratory in 1918 aged 20 and spent decades working in the shadow of the star chemist she assisted. In December 2025 the team published a version of these stories for younger readers, which makes an excellent present for a bored eleven-year-old.

Elsewhere the work is being done one page at a time. Jess Wade, a physicist at Imperial College London, has written more than 2,000 Wikipedia biographies since 2018, largely of women and scientists from underrepresented backgrounds. Her reasoning is practical rather than sentimental: being findable is what generates invitations, citations and jobs.

In February 2026 the Royal Society launched an interactive map of UK landmarks connected to historical women in science, and openly admitted it needs help filling it in. And this spring, English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque at 70 Lansdowne Road in Notting Hill, the teenage home of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who established in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars are made overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium. The leading astronomer of the day, Henry Norris Russell, pressed her to add a disclaimer saying the result was almost certainly not real. Within a few years he had reached the same conclusion himself. Payne-Gaposchkin later wrote that she blamed herself for deferring to authority when she knew she was right, and offered it as a warning to younger scientists. Her plaque exists because three teenagers on an English Heritage youth placement nominated her in 2022.

The trap of the tragic heroine

One caution, because the genre has a failure mode. In 2023, the zoologist Matthew Cobb and historian Nathaniel Comfort argued in Nature that casting Rosalind Franklin as the wronged heroine of DNA does her a quiet disservice. Working from her own papers, they made the case that she was not a victim who had her data stolen but an equal member of the group that solved the structure, and that she understood perfectly well what her results meant.

The distinction matters. Rediscovery works best when it restores authorship rather than martyrdom. Lehmann does not need to be a tragedy. She was a formidable scientist who was right about the interior of the planet decades before anyone could prove it, and who then spent her retirement working on the mantle for good measure.

How to join in

            •           Submit a location to the Royal Society’s UK map of women in science.

            •           Nominate someone for a blue plaque. The Payne-Gaposchkin plaque started with three young people and a form.

            •           Add or improve a Wikipedia biography. Wade’s guides make the first edit far less daunting than it looks.

            •           Listen to a season of Lost Women of Science, then pass the book on to a teenager.

Every geophysics textbook printed today names the Lehmann discontinuity. It is one of the few things down there that carries anybody’s name at all, and it carries hers.