The Matilda Effect offers a lens for understanding how recognition shapes advancement in accounting firms.
By Bonnie Buol Ruszczyk
Accounting MOVE Project
The accounting profession has spent years grappling with a persistent and uncomfortable reality: women enter the field in strong numbers, perform at a high level, and yet remain underrepresented in leadership.
That gap has been measured repeatedly through industry research, like the Accounting MOVE Project. The harder question is why it keeps showing up. The answer may lie in something more fundamental than policy or pipeline: how work is recognized, attributed, and ultimately rewarded,
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That’s where the Matilda Effect comes in.
The Matilda Effect is about attribution, not participation.
First defined by historian Margaret Rossiter in Social Studies of Science, the Matilda Effect describes the systematic tendency for women’s contributions to be overlooked — or credited to men.
When contributions are not accurately recognized, firms are not just creating internal inequities; they are undermining leadership development, pushing experienced professionals out the door, and losing people who can easily take their talent elsewhere.
It is not simply about exclusion from opportunity. It is about who gets recognized as the source of ideas, innovation, and results. Participation without recognition does not build careers, particularly in a profession where visibility drives opportunity.
History shows the pattern clearly.
Long before anyone had a name for it, the Matilda Effect was quietly reshaping the scientific record.
- Rosalind Franklin’s X-ray diffraction image, commonly referred to as Photo 51, was critical to identifying the structure of DNA, yet James Watson and Francis Crick became synonymous with the discovery and received the Nobel Prize. Franklin’s contributions were not fully acknowledged until after her death.
- Lise Meitner’s theoretical work was essential to explaining nuclear fission, one of the most consequential scientific breakthroughs of the 20th century. Yet the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went solely to her collaborator, Otto Hahn.
- Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars as a graduate student. The Nobel Prize went to her advisor, Antony Hewish.
- Alice Ball developed the first effective treatment for leprosy, known as the “Ball Method.” After her death, her work was published and credited to a male colleague, Dr. Arthur Dean.
- Outside of science, Lizzie Magie’s Landlord’s Game, designed to illustrate the dangers of land monopolies, was later commercialized as Monopoly, with credit going to Charles Darrow.
These are not obscure footnotes. They are foundational contributions that shaped entire fields.
Which raises a harder question: if the pattern is this clear in well-documented cases, how often did it play out in ways that were simply never recorded?
The modern version is harder to see, but no less real.
It is tempting to view the Matilda Effect as a relic of a more overtly exclusionary past. But the underlying mechanism, misattribution of contribution, does not require explicit discrimination to persist.
Research in organizational psychology has shown that women’s contributions are more likely to be attributed to collective effort, while men’s contributions are more likely to be recognized as individual achievement. These differences are often subtle, but they accumulate in performance evaluations, promotion decisions, and assessments of who is ready for the next level.
In practice, misattribution rarely looks like a deliberate act. More often, it looks ordinary.
A woman is interrupted in a meeting, and her point is picked up minutes later by someone else who is then credited with the idea. A manager summarizes a project and defaults to naming the most senior or most vocal person involved, rather than the one who did the work. A client relationship gradually shifts in perception — not because ownership formally changed, but because one voice is heard more often than another. In some cases, leaders simply do not take the time to understand how work is actually getting done and rely instead on who speaks most confidently about it.
None of these moments, on their own, seems significant. But over time, they shape who is seen as driving value and who is seen as supporting it, and that distinction directly affects advancement.
Where this shows up in accounting firms.
The mechanisms are the same inside accounting firms; only the stakes are more concrete.
Firms assign credit constantly, through client ownership, revenue attribution, engagement leadership, and positioning for the next opportunity. These decisions are often made in good faith, but they are shaped as much by perception as by measurable contribution.
The profession has made progress addressing structural barriers such as flexibility, benefits, and advancement pathways, but those issues have not been studied consistently or addressed with the depth they require. Attribution is examined even less, despite being one of the primary mechanisms through which inequities take hold.
A shifting environment and a familiar risk.
At the same time, the broader conversation around diversity, equity, and inclusion is being pushed backward. Across industries, DEI efforts are being scaled back or eliminated, often under the argument that they are unnecessary or inconsistent with merit-based decision-making. (See my article on that topic, here.)
But much of what is being dismissed as “DEI” was never about giving anyone an advantage. It was about correcting the record, making sure contributions are accurately recognized, that credit is assigned where it belongs, and that patterns of exclusion are not repeated. When those efforts are removed, the effect is not neutrality. It is a quiet return to incomplete narratives, where the accomplishments of women and people of color are more easily overlooked, reassigned, or minimized.
Historian Gerda Lerner has noted that efforts to revisit historical narratives, particularly those involving women and people of color, are often characterized as revisionist, even when they are grounded in documented evidence. The result is a tension between preserving the official record and reinstating what it left out. When the mechanisms that surface those corrections are removed, the patterns they were designed to address don’t disappear. They simply go unnamed.
The cost to firms and to the profession
For accounting firms, the implications are immediate and practical. The profession is already navigating real pressure on talent pipelines, retention, and succession planning. Mid-career attrition remains a critical concern, particularly among professionals who should be moving into leadership roles.
When contributions are not accurately recognized, firms are not just creating internal inequities; they are undermining leadership development, pushing experienced professionals out the door, and losing people who can easily take their talent elsewhere.
Recognition is not automatic
One of the most persistent misconceptions in professional environments is that good work will naturally be recognized. The history of the Matilda Effect suggests otherwise.
Recognition depends on who is visible, who is credited, and how contributions are described. These are not passive outcomes. They are shaped by systems, reinforced by habits, and influenced by leadership behavior.
For firms, this means paying closer attention to how credit is assigned in practice. Who is introduced as the lead on a client engagement? Whose name is attached to a success? How are contributions framed in performance discussions? These are not administrative details. They are strategic decisions.
A profession built on accuracy should apply it internally
The accounting profession prides itself on accuracy, transparency, and accountability. Applying those same standards internally means ensuring that contributions are recognized with the same rigor applied to financial reporting.
The Matilda Effect is often discussed as a historical phenomenon. Its relevance today lies in what it reveals: without intentional attention, the systems that allow misattribution to persist do not correct themselves.
Progress in the profession has never been automatic. It has required measurement, visibility, and a willingness to examine patterns that are not always comfortable to confront. Stepping away from that work does not preserve progress.
It risks undoing it quietly and over time.