The Matilda Effect: Women Missing from Science
Indian women scientists face systemic underrecognition through cumulative barriers rather than explicit rejection, despite making up 43% of STEM enrollments but only 18.6% of the R&D workforce.
Newsnibs Staff
- 2026-10-13
- Updated 5:28 AM UTC
In 1933, the physicist CV Raman turned away a job applicant named Kamala Bhagvat because she was a woman. She was eventually admitted to the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru anyway, and went on to work at Cambridge with the biochemist Robin Hill. A decade later, Bibha Chowdhuri worked alongside DM Bose in Kolkata on cosmic ray research that fed into work recognized by the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded to Cecil Powell. Chowdhuri's name did not appear on it.
The historian Margaret W Rossiter gave this pattern a name in 1993: the Matilda Effect, after the systematic underrecognition of women's scientific contributions, often with credit flowing instead to male collaborators. Bhagvat and Chowdhuri are frequently cited as Indian examples of it.
The raw exclusion that defined those cases has mostly disappeared from Indian science. No institute today would reject an applicant outright for being a woman the way Raman did in 1933. But the numbers suggest the field has not caught up to that change. Women made up 43% of STEM enrolment in India in the 2021-22 academic year, according to the All India Survey on Higher Education. By the time that pipeline reaches the research workforce, the share drops sharply: the Department of Science and Technology's 2023 R&D report put women at 18.6% of India's R&D workforce. A survey by researchers Shruti Muralidhar and Vaishnavi Ananthanarayanan, covering 98 Indian universities, found a median of just 16.7% women on STEM faculties.
What fills the gap between enrolment and advancement is less a single barrier than an accumulation of smaller ones. Sania Singh, now an MSc student at Imperial College London, has described the cumulative effect of being one of very few women in her cohort: a steady, low-grade signal that compounds over a degree or a career. Researchers studying the issue describe these conditions as the kind that make women feel invisible or alienated in their own labs and departments, a climate that wears on a person's ability to participate and eventually to stay in the field at all.
Bhagvat's and Chowdhuri's stories are cited now less as isolated injustices than as the visible tip of a mechanism that persists in quieter form: not a single rejection letter, but a faculty meeting, a lab, a cohort in which the numbers alone shape who gets heard.
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
