I recently came across an article in Forbes magazine talking about why, in the field of psychology, where women constitute two-thirds of faculty members, women’s research is referenced so many fewer times than men’s. This phenomenon is not unique to psychology: research shows that this happens in “pure” science fields as well. The field of political science has even named a few phenomena related to what happens: the Matthew Effect occurs when men’s research is viewed as the most central and important in a field, while the Matilda Effect occurs when women’s research is valued less than men’s, or their ideas are attributed to male scholars.

You might think that that men don’t reference women’s research is because men prefer to cite the work of people who are like them. But you’d be wrong. It turns out the reason this happens is far more troubling and hard to change. Men simply forget about women’s contributions.

The study referenced in the Forbes article entitled “I Forgot That You Existed: Role of Memory Accessibility in the Gender Citation Gap” asked faculty from psychology departments in R1 institutions in the United States to list up to five names they considered to be experts in their field and up to five names they considered to be rising stars. (R1 institutions are doctoral degree-granting universities with very high research activity.)

While, with regard to experts in their field, female faculty members generally recalled women’s names at the same percentage that there were senior female faculty at R1 institutions, the percentage recalled by male faculty members was much lower. With rising stars, the study found that male participants significantly under-identified female rising stars compared to the percentage of more junior female faculty at R1 institutions, while female participants over-identified female rising stars. In addition, male names were also more likely to be generated earlier in the lists prepared by male respondents.

The male respondents had no issue with name recognition. When provided the names of female experts, they knew who they were. But, when asked to identify experts, men largely identified men, even in a women-dominated field!

The study’s authors concluded that the results showed that the failure to recall the names of women was an issue of cognitive accessibility—how readily available information is during retrieval. If information is cognitively accessible, it is retrievable at the moment and comes to mind quickly.

Male faculty members simply didn’t think of their female peers.

It Doesn’t Just Happen in Academia

Veronica Yan, the professor at The University of Texas at Austin who authored the study referenced above, explained a few things. First, and although I wish this went without saying, men’s work isn’t cited more because their research is of higher quality than women’s research.

Second, the results of Yan’s study explain far more than citation gap. As she is quoted as saying in the Forbes article:

This, of course, happens in the legal profession as well. It’s why, as I’ve discussed before, we still need to have awards specific to women lawyers. Without those awards, men simply would not remember the excellence that women have achieved. It’s why we continue to see the same people on panels discussing various topics. And it’s the reason why people only remember the name of the man at the top of the signature block, rather than the teams of (usually) women beneath him who likely did the work for which he got credit.

I can’t tell you how many times in my career I’ve greeted a man with whom I had previously worked on a case—often for years—and he simply didn’t remember me. I used to take it personally, until I learned, and therefore started noticing, how women’s work and efforts are so often forgotten.

While I’m sure in some cases women’s work is forgotten because men intentionally steal credit from women, I strongly suspect that’s the exception rather than the rule. Men haven’t deliberately set out to erase women’s achievements from history. Instead, they don’t remember those achievements because they are inconsistent with how men—and women—have learned that history occurs.

In order to overcome cognitive accessibility bias, we need to retrain our minds and our memories. We need to notice women’s contributions—and say them out loud—so that we don’t so quickly default to men’s achievements. We can’t only promote more women, pay them more, and enact other policies designed to improve gender parity; we need to alter our implicit and socially-constructed biases.

As I’ve studied more history, I increasingly find it depressing to think of the stories of incredible people that were simply never told and thus forgotten. But it turns out that men in particular do this regularly when it comes to women—which has given us a limited view of what constitutes excellence within our profession.

We all have to do some internal work on what happens within our own minds. Because once you start to see it, you will never see in the same way again.

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