The phenomenon is named after the American suffragette, activist and sociologist Matilda Joslyn Gage. In 1870, she wrote a pamphlet entitled Woman as Inventor , condemning the then-widespread idea that women lacked inventive drive and scientific talent: “Such statements are made lightly or ignorantly. Tradition, history and experience prove that women possess these abilities to the highest degree,” the essay says. About a hundred years later, this pamphlet fell into the hands of the historian Margaret Rossiter, who has since processed the achievements of forgotten women scientists in several books. In a 1993 essay entitled The Matilda Effect in Science, she referred to Gage and christened the phenomenon of the neglected female scientist with her name. "Recent work has brought to light so many historical and contemporary cases of women scientists who have been ignored, denied credit, or otherwise overlooked that a gender-linked phenomenon appears to be at play here," Rossiter wrote at the time.