Not weaker, made invisible

A few weeks ago I was sitting on the sofa with The Menopause Brain by neuroscientist Lisa Mosconi. A beautiful book. Until, in one chapter, I read what Charles Darwin once wrote about women and suddenly I saw the man I had admired in secondary school in a different light. Evolution was my favourite subject back then. How did he manage to figure it all out, I used to think. Now my main thought was: ouch.

But the longer I sat with it, the less it was about Darwin. Because I saw a pattern, and that pattern is what this piece is really about.

The pattern, very simply

Slowly now, because this is the heart of it. Women rarely had to fight to be allowed to do something. They were already doing it. They had to fight to be seen, to be honestly credited for what they had long been doing.

So hold on to this little list of four. It comes back in every story below:

• Capable. A woman can do something, and does it.
• Erased. Her work disappears, or a man gets the credit.
• “Explained.” Someone invents a fine-sounding, “scientific” reason why that’s simply how it should be.
• Corrected. Much later it turns out not to be true and it’s put right, often by a woman.

Capable, erased, “explained”, corrected. Keep those four words close.

And one thing straight away, because this piece must not become an indictment of men: that would be unfair. I’ll explain why in a moment.

First, 2,400 years back: the philosopher who didn’t count

Because this is no new trick. It’s ancient.

Come with me to ancient Greece. There, Aristotle, one of the cleverest people who ever lived, calmly wrote down that men have more teeth than women. He was so sure of it that he simply put it in a book without checking. And he was married twice. The philosopher Bertrand Russell later remarked drily that Aristotle could have looked inside one of his wives’ mouths and counted. That would have spared him the blunder. (For the record: men and women have the same number of teeth.)

Funny? Certainly. But look at what sits underneath. Aristotle believed women were “defective men”, literally a kind of unfinished version. And if you’re already certain of that, why bother counting? The conclusion was fixed before the measurement. Remember that sentence. You’ll meet it again and again.

And now the lovely part, because even then it wasn’t “all men against all women”. In that same Greece, Plato wrote that women could perfectly well govern the city, as long as they were given the same education as men. And Socrates? He said a woman, Diotima, had taught him everything about love. (Historians debate whether she truly existed or was a literary figure, honesty demands I say so.) Two and a half thousand years ago, opinions were already divided. That matters: it was never one single front.

Darwin’s error

Two thousand years later, exactly the same trick, only dressed up more neatly. In The Descent of Man (1871) Darwin put it bluntly: man attains “a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up,” than woman, and has “ultimately become superior to woman.” In his eyes, women were evolutionarily less far along: perhaps morally finer, but intellectually the lesser.

Here lies an error you could explain to a ten-year-old. Darwin looked around, saw no famous female scientists, artists or leaders, and concluded: therefore women cannot do it. But women weren’t allowed into university, weren’t allowed to publish, weren’t allowed to vote. He confused “they don’t do it” with “they can’t do it.” A circle that keeps itself going: shut someone out, then use her absence as proof that she isn’t up to it.

The loveliest part: Darwin doubted himself. In a letter to the American Caroline Kennard (early 1880s) he admitted the difference might well be cultural, and that women would catch up the moment they were given education and work. He already knew, really. But in his book stood the conclusion, not the doubt.

Almost a century earlier, by the way, someone had already said it with perfect clarity. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that women only appear lesser because they are denied an education. Give them schooling, and the difference evaporates. She wrote it before Darwin was even born. The knowledge was already there. It simply wasn’t heard.

Broca’s scale — and the woman who toppled it

Darwin wasn’t alone. Take Paul Broca, a brilliant French anatomist — yes, the same Broca as the “Broca’s area” in your brain. After death, he weighed the brains of men and women, saw that women’s were on average lighter, and decided: smaller brain, therefore less intelligent.

A colleague pointed out: but women are on average smaller in build, too; a smaller body simply goes with a smaller brain. Logical, surely? Broca waved it away. It didn’t fit his conclusion, a conclusion he had, in truth, ready before he started measuring. Just like Aristotle with his teeth. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould later showed, in his essay Women’s Brains, that Broca’s figures were correct, but that his reasoning ran backwards: he knew what had to come out, and chose the facts that fitted.

And then came the loveliest turn. Around 1900 the statistician Alice Lee, working in Karl Pearson’s laboratory in London, took up the skull-measurers’ very own methods. She measured skull capacity, including that of eminent male professors, and demonstrated that skull size predicts nothing about intelligence. A woman dealt the death blow to a whole field, using their own tools. You’re allowed a little smile there.

See the pattern? Capable. Erased with a scale. And corrected by precisely the person the measurement was “meant” to defeat.

Honestly: it wasn’t “all men against all women”

Here I have to pause, because otherwise I’d be telling the story crookedly, and I don’t want that.

It’s tempting to read this as “the men” versus “the women”. But it wasn’t that simple, and historians rightly point this out. Most men, in the past, had little power either. The average farmer, labourer or soldier had hardly more say over his fate than his wife did. It was rarely all men versus all women; it was a small elite, almost always men, yes – standing above them both, deciding who was allowed to learn, publish, vote and be recognised.

And don’t forget who made the corrections possible. Stephen Jay Gould, who exposed Broca’s reasoning, was a man. The colleague who contradicted Broca about body size was a man. Many female pioneers needed at least one influential man who said: “Let her try.” That’s not a detail, that is the system. It shows how locked the doors were: without a key from the inside, you didn’t get through.

So this story isn’t about blame. It’s about a structure and about the courage, of women and men, to make that structure fairer.

The greatest erasure: who kept us alive?

Now a deeper layer, because it wasn’t only about who was allowed to be called clever. It was about who kept us alive as a species.

For generations, science told one story about how we became human: Man the Hunter. The man hunted, brought meat, and supposedly shaped our large brains, our tools and our society. The woman? She sat by the camp with the children. A supporting role. In 1975 the anthropologist Sally Slocum was the first to cut sharply through this with her essay Woman the Gatherer: the story was full of male assumptions. Because who fed the family on the days the hunt brought back nothing? The gathering women, with their plants, tubers and knowledge, often the steady, daily lion’s share of the calories.

And “the days the hunt brought back nothing” were many. Here come the numbers, because they’re almost unbelievable. The anthropologist Kristen Hawkes and her colleagues studied the Hadza, hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. What did they find? When it comes to big game, a hunter comes home empty-handed on roughly 96 to 99 days out of 100. Big game succeeds on only about 1 to 3 per cent of days, roughly once a month to once every three months. Even the best hunters catch nothing on most days.

And the gathering women? They almost never came home with nothing. When they went looking for plant food, they found it. Not the spectacular hunt, but the quiet, daily digging of the women kept the family alive.

Hawkes noticed something striking, too. Not the hunting men, but the older women were the most reliable source of food. Grandmothers dug up the nourishing tubers that small children can’t get out of the ground themselves. And when a mother had yet another baby, the growth of her older child suddenly turned out to depend on the work of… the grandmother.

This is the grandmother hypothesis (first proposed by the biologist George Williams in 1957): women live so long after their fertile years precisely because grandmothers kept grandchildren alive, allowing daughters to have children again sooner. This may have helped shape our long lifespan. In Darwin’s logic, a woman past her fertile years is “finished”, biologically redundant. The grandmother hypothesis turns that exactly around: perhaps the old woman is one of the very engines of our species. (Staying honest: not everyone is convinced; some researchers call it a beautiful but hard-to-prove story)

And in war? They were never absent

The pattern didn’t stop in prehistory. It travelled along, right onto the battlefield. We usually tell the history of war through kings and generals, and so it looks as if women weren’t there. But they were, time and again. They were simply made less visible.

Sometimes they led. Boudica, queen of a British tribe, led one of the largest revolts Rome ever faced in Britain, in the first century. And then Joan of Arc, a simple farm girl from the north-east of France. She said she heard voices telling her to free her country. Not yet eighteen, she led French troops during the Hundred Years’ War and helped break the siege of Orléans. At nineteen she was captured and burned. Centuries later she was canonised and became a national symbol. (And honestly: of figures from the deep past, think of Queen Tomyris, or the samurai Tomoe Gozen, historians often doubt the details. The sources are thin. But that such women were sung about at all says enough.)

Sometimes they healed. Florence Nightingale brought down the death rates during the Crimean War, not with miracles, but with hygiene, figures and organisation. She laid the foundations of modern nursing. Edith Cavell, a nurse in the First World War, helped soldiers escape from occupied territory. She was executed, and became a symbol of courage.

Sometimes they fought and resisted. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was a sniper in the Red Army. With 309 confirmed kills she is regarded as the deadliest female sniper in history, before that, she was simply a history student. Nancy Wake and Virginia Hall (who operated with a wooden leg) built resistance networks in occupied France; the Gestapo saw them as dangerous adversaries. Harriet Tubman led not only people out of slavery to freedom during the American Civil War, but an armed military operation as well.

But notice the price of that visibility. Why do we know precisely these names? Often because there was an exceptional situation that briefly broke the rules open. Three things keep recurring: a crisis (in war, men died, shortages arose, and women suddenly became indispensable), talent too great to ignore, and a powerful man who said “yes”. Joan gained access to the dauphin; had he ignored her, no one would ever have known her name.

And that’s exactly where the ache lies. That a woman only got through the wall when the wall briefly cracked, or when someone with the key let her in, doesn’t prove women were the exception. It proves how high and how locked that wall stood. Behind every famous name stand countless equally capable women whose names we will never know, not because they could do less, but because the crack didn’t quite reach them.

The Matilda effect: erased in the lab itself

And when the crack did come, and a woman made a discovery, there was still one last way to make her invisible. Simply leave out her name.

The historian of science Margaret Rossiter gave it a name in 1993: the Matilda effect, the systematic tendency to attribute women’s discoveries to male colleagues. And the examples are painfully concrete:

• Lise Meitner worked out the theory behind nuclear fission. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry (1944) went to her colleague Otto Hahn. Not to her.
• Rosalind Franklin produced “Photo 51”, the X-ray image that revealed the double helix of DNA. The Nobel Prize (1962) went to Watson, Crick and Wilkins. She had died by then and went largely unnamed.
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars as a PhD student. (A pulsar is a rapidly spinning, collapsed star, a neutron star, that sends rhythmic ticks of radiation out into space like a cosmic lighthouse.) The Nobel Prize (1974) went to her supervisor. Not to her.

Capable. Discovery made. Name erased. Exactly the same pattern as Broca’s scale, only now with a prize ceremony instead of an autopsy.

Marie Curie: the woman who carried the price in her pocket

One woman even the Matilda effect couldn’t wipe away. And her story moves me most of all.

Marie Curie, together with her husband Pierre, discovered two new elements: polonium, which she named after her homeland, Poland and radium. They worked in a draughty shed, without any protection, because no one knew yet how dangerous radiation was. She handled radium with her bare hands. She carried test tubes of glowing material around in her coat pockets. She kept them in her desk drawer, because she found the soft green glow so beautiful.

In 1903 she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (Physics). In 1911 she won another (Chemistry). To this day she is the only woman with two Nobel Prizes, and one of very few people ever to win in two different sciences.

But the radiation that made her famous also made her ill. She died in 1934, at sixty-six, of aplastic anaemia, her bone marrow gave out, almost certainly from all those years of exposure. And the most haunting detail: nearly a century on, her laboratory notebooks are still so radioactive that they’re kept in lead-lined boxes. Anyone wishing to see them must wear protective clothing and sign a waiver. She carried the price of her discovery, quite literally, in her pockets and that price is still glowing today.

The numbers that make the pattern visible

Want to know how deep this ran? Just count the Nobel Prizes. In more than a century, across all the science categories together, only a handful went to women, in the natural sciences, around 25 since 1901.

But look at when it changes. Since 2001, more women have been honoured than in the entire twentieth century before it. And the explanation isn’t that women suddenly grew cleverer, that would be an insult to every woman before 2001. The explanation is that more and more women gained access to the same opportunities: education, laboratories, academic posts.

One detail makes it especially lovely, and it’s exactly what Darwin already suspected in that letter. A scientific career takes a long time. You earn your doctorate, you do thirty years of research, and your discovery is sometimes only honoured with the highest prize decades later. So the effect of the education revolution of the 1960s and 70s, when the doors really opened, doesn’t show up at once. You’re only seeing it arrive now, year after year. We are watching, in real time, the pattern correcting itself. The lag was never innate. It was a delay.

And today?

The sociologist Arlie Hochschild called it the “second shift”. Women work for pay, and then at home put in another shift of cooking, caring and – above all – remembering everything.

You might know the ritual. He flops onto the sofa after work. “Phew, what a day.” And you know what: that’s entirely fair, he worked hard. Not every man, and by no means only men, let’s be honest. But she worked too. It’s just that for her, the second shift only begins then: the dinner, the homework, the laundry, and that quiet list in her head of what’s nearly run out and has to be bought tomorrow. The strange thing isn’t that it’s heavy. The strange thing is that for so long we simply called it “normal”.

And here, once again, the honest nuance, because it belongs in this piece: newer time-use research shows that when you add paid and unpaid work together, the total hours of men and women come out roughly equal. So it isn’t a contest over who has it harder. Men carry too.

The point is a different one, and it’s exactly the pattern of this whole piece: a woman’s work was always there, it simply wasn’t counted. Not seen. Not recognised as “real” work, real hunting, real science, real combat.

In closing

From Aristotle’s teeth to Darwin’s pen, from Broca’s scale to the trench, from the Nobel committee to the kitchen table: always the same thing. The woman had to fight not to be allowed to do something, but to be honestly seen for what she was already doing.

Look at the pattern one more time. Aristotle knew women had fewer teeth, so he didn’t need to count. Broca knew a smaller brain was worth less, so he didn’t need to think further. Each time the conclusion was already there, and the woman had to push against it. The weapon was never the truth. It was fake objectivity: an opinion in a white coat.

And the only thing that ever set it right was real science. Honest measuring. Honest counting. The honesty to say: I was wrong. Often the correction came from a woman. Sometimes from a man who dared to look honestly. Almost always with the very tools that had first been used against her.

Marie Curie carried the price of her discovery, literally, in her coat pocket, test tubes that still glow a hundred years on. So many women carried their work into history without anyone adding it up.

So if you’re reading this, and you carry a lot, and you sometimes think no one sees it: remember this. It was carried before you, too, by women who didn’t know they were making history. You stand on their shoulders. And unlike them, you are counted.

Look honestly. At the past, at the figures, and also at the stories that happen to flatter you. That isn’t cold advice. It’s the finest tribute there is.

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Further reading

• Menopause, honestly explained
• Why rest has become unbearable
• Pawn and king: who you remain
• People never forget how you made them feel

Sources

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• Aristotle. (n.d.). Aristotle’s History of animals in ten books (R. Cresswell, Trans.). Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/59058 (Original work published ca. 350 B.C.E.)
• Burda, M., Hamermesh, D. S., & Weil, P. (2013). Total work and gender: Facts and possible explanations. Journal of Population Economics, 26(1), 239–261. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00148-012-0408-x
• Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. John Murray.
• Darwin, C. (1882, January 9). Letter to Caroline A. Kennard (Letter No. 13607). Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge. https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/caroline-kennard
• Gentry, C. (2021, March 22). “Lady Death” of the Red Army: Lyudmila Pavlichenko. The National WWII Museum. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/lady-death-red-army-lyudmila-pavlichenko
• Gould, S. J. (1980). Women’s brains. In The panda’s thumb: More reflections in natural history. W. W. Norton.
• Hawkes, K., O’Connell, J. F., & Blurton Jones, N. G. (1991). Hunting income patterns among the Hadza: Big game, common goods, foraging goals and the evolution of the human diet. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 334(1270), 243–250. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1991.0113
• Hawkes, K., O’Connell, J. F., & Blurton Jones, N. G. (2001). Hadza meat sharing. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(2), 113–142. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1090-5138(00)00066-0
• Hawkes, K., O’Connell, J. F., Blurton Jones, N. G., Alvarez, H., & Charnov, E. L. (1998). Grandmothering, menopause, and the evolution of human life histories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 95(3), 1336–1339. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.95.3.1336
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• Mosconi, L. (2024). The menopause brain. Avery.
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Sources on this site are cited in APA style, with a DOI wherever one exists. Why I made that choice →