There are a lot of quotations out there about the nobility of doing work without demanding credit. Without exception, they’re attributed to—and thus were likely originally spoken by—men. Men have the luxury of advocating for a society in which we selfishly work towards a better good because they haven’t experienced lifetimes of having the credit for their work stolen by others.

If you’re a woman lawyer, you’ve inevitably had your ideas and achievements adopted by men. In the ABA publication In Their Own Words, 46 percent of experienced women lawyers said that they were dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied with the recognition they received for their work as opposed to just 15 percent of men.

Taking credit is somewhat of an art form in the law. I have been known to amuse myself by looking at law firm websites and seeing how certain firms take credit for the work largely if not entirely done by others. In many cases on the plaintiffs’ side, I know of cases unquestionably originated by women where, reading accounts of those cases, you’d never know that woman had any role in the matter. Instead, a law firm owned or managed by a man now claims her work as his own. Similarly, on the defense side, women lawyers fight for origination credit from men who haven’t done work on a client or file for decades. You won’t find published stories about these battles: they’re navigated behind closed doors and resolved under the cover of NDAs. But in the end, history is told by the victors. And victors in the legal profession are almost always men.

Stealing credit isn’t only about origination credit and it’s not always about cases or matters that cost women millions of dollars in earnings. It also happens in much smaller ways on a daily basis in law and can demoralize the women who regularly experience it. The man who adopted a woman’s strategy as his own. The male associate who calls the partner to tell him about the legal argument he came up with—an argument that was actually developed by his female colleague. The woman who developed a path for success in an oral argument that previously eluded her male colleagues, only to have it subsequently adopted by everyone without crediting her innovation.

We can get insights about these issues from a new book called Oh No He Didn’t!-Brilliant Women and the Men Who Took Credit for Their Work by Wendy J. Murphy, JD. By telling stories of women who had their work and ideas stolen in nearly every discipline, it makes a compelling case that men taking credit for women’s achievements defines some of the largest discoveries and movements of our time.

In this week’s Comes Now, we talk about the lessons of Murphy’s book.

When Women Are Juniors

One of the ways that credit is often taken from women is when a younger woman develops an idea that is subsequently stolen by her male “mentor,” professor, or boss. Senior men are able to do this not just because they’re men, but because their seniority and expertise entitles them to deference and makes them more believable when they claim the ideas of others.

For example, Candace Pert discovered the cell receptor for opiates when she was a PhD student and was the first scientist to identify a cell receptor in the brain. She was not just a PhD student following the instructions of her lab instructor; she invented the research tool that ultimately made the discovery. However, Solomon Snyder, her professor at Johns Hopkins University, claimed the credit and ultimately received the Lasker Award for that discovery in 1978. Pert spent the rest of her life making people aware that she had made the discovery. Years later, a member of the committee that gave the Lasker Award to Snyder published a letter in Science apologizing to Pert.

Similarly, Alice Ball developed a treatment for leprosy. She died at age 24 after being exposed to chlorine in her laboratory. After her death, Ball’s graduate adviser and the dean of Harvard College took credit for her discovery. It wasn’t until 2004, when a scholar at the University of Hawaii named Paul Wernager gave a lecture on the subject, that it became widely known that Ball was the actual inventor.

Stories like these happen to young women lawyers as well. Credit is so often a function of age or seniority and, since there are so few women at the top of law firms, Fortune 500 corporations, or government entities, male lawyers often receive credit for ideas or work conceived by their female colleagues.

Women As Invisible Team Members

Many of the stories in Murphy’s book come from scientific fields where people typically work in teams or are working in parallel on the same topic across the world. The structure of scientific work has hurt women again and again. History is filled with stories of male scientists who either stole credit from their female team members or who took all of the credit for an accomplishment, failing to credit a female member of their team.

Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for discovering nuclear fission. However, Lisa Meitner, who for decades had designed and conducted the experiments that led to Hahn’s discovery, had been the one to explain nuclear fission to Hahn when he failed to comprehend what was happening in the experiments Meitner designed. In 1944 some critics pointed out that Meitner also deserved the prize, but Hahn publicly denied that the woman who had worked with him for decades had any role in his discovery. (He did give her part of his cash award.)

But this pattern doesn’t just happen in science. A story that will feel familiar to many women lawyers is that of Anna Arnold Hedgemann, a social justice activist who was invited to serve on the central organizing committee for the March on Washington, where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous I Have a Dream speech. Despite designing key aspects of the March and encouraging tens of thousands of Black people to attend, the organizers of the March are now only known as the Big Six, all of whom are men.

Men taking credit for the work of their women team members happens in the law as well. While virtually no ground-breaking legal cases or matters are accomplished alone, it is almost always the first name on the signature block who receives credit for victories. Those names are, of course, frequently men. The various awards given on an annual basis to attorneys are often for achievements on a particular case or matter. But the award is given to one person rather than a team.

Not Speaking Up About It

Throughout Murphy’s book, it becomes clear that one of the reasons men have gotten away with stealing the credit for women’s work for so long is because women either didn’t—or couldn’t—speak up about it. Indeed, in many of the chapters in the book, it was a man—sometimes centuries later—who discovered that a man took credit for a woman’s achievement.

Eunice Foote discovered the phenomenon of global warming in 1856. But in 1859, John Tyndall, a scientist who had never previously written about the subject, claimed he was the first to discover the thermal effect of the sun’s rays on carbon dioxide and was widely credited with having made that discovery for over a century. It wasn’t until 2019 when Foote was properly credited with her discovery, after John Perlin, a science historian, discovered her 1856 paper.

Elizabeth Magie created what became the game Monopoly in 1897, but her idea was stolen by Charles Darrow, who subsequently sold the game to Parker Brothers. It wasn’t until 1973, when Parker Brothers sued a man who invented a game called Anti-Monopoly for copyright infringement and had to prove that Darrow invented the game, that the public learned who actually created Monopoly.

To be clear, Murphy doesn’t blame the women in her stories for failing to speak up. She acknowledges that, if they had, no one would have believed them. For a woman to be credible, she needs to be endorsed by a man. Women who seek to receive origination credit in law firms frequently run across this same issue. Make the claim for credit on their own and they are not believed or considered strident or hysterical. Having a male partner advocate on her behalf and the chances of success increase dramatically.

It’s important that women speak up about their own achievements. Claiming credit we are rightfully due not only confers financial and other career benefits, but it leads to more women receiving credit they are owed. As Murphy says in a chapter discussing the black women mathematicians profiled in the book and movie Hidden Figures, “[e]very time one woman’s story is told, there’s a chance it could lead to other untold stories.” p.36 Perhaps more importantly, telling women’s stories feeds the imaginations of future generations.

Closing Thoughts

Reading Murphy’s book you come away with the impression that there hasn’t been a major innovation, artistic work, or invention that wasn’t stolen by a man from a woman. Women like Mileva Einstein (Albert Einstein), Camille Claudel (Auguste Rodin), Marion Mahony Griffin (Frank Lloyd Wright), Zelda Fitzgerald (F. Scott Fitzgerald), and Anna Arnold Hedgemann (Martin Luther King, Jr.) all had their ideas stolen by men.

Of course, women aren’t the only people whose achievements have been stolen from them. The more history you read, the more you realize that many of the geniuses we were taught to admire stood on the shoulders (or the chests, quite frankly) of those below them.

The way we begin to change this is to tell different stories. In her Author’s Note at the end of the book, Murphy references an article written by Blair Glaser in the Huffington Post in 2021 after she discovered a male colleague had stolen her ideas and published them in a bestselling book. Glaser wrestles with how she confronted the author, being kind to him even once it was clear he had engaged in outright theft. She encourages women to put aside the discomfort of calling out things as they are and support other women who do so:

Women need to tell the stories of themselves and other women. And as I mentioned above, we need male allies to do that too.

But some of the stories in Murphy’s book don’t describe outright theft; they describe when men failed to give credit to women who significantly contributed to their success. So in addition to telling the stories of other women and calling out the theft of our ideas, perhaps we also need to tell stories differently. We’ve grown up thinking that brilliant individuals have moved society forward, but it’s almost always been groups of people who do.

In the legal profession, rather than identifying stars, we should recognize teams that accomplish extraordinary things. Public Justice has done this for years: even though its annual award is called Trial Lawyer of the Year, the award recognizes the team that did the work. Similarly, in awarding origination credit, we should recognize that there are several different types of origination: retaining the client, expanding the scope of work done for that client, winning or favorably settling a case, or keeping a client from walking when things go wrong.

As long as we see achievement as winner-takes-all, the winners will always . . . take all.

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