When Men Take Credit for the Work of Women

A few years ago, while at work on a scholarly article about the history of the struggle for women’s equality, the lawyer, writer, and television legal analyst Wendy Murphy found herself stumped. “I wanted to add a footnote to the paper referencing the problem of men taking credit for women’s work,” Murphy recalled. “I went looking for a book that described the problem, and it didn’t exist.” So she thought to herself, I’m going to write it.

Murphy spent the next year doing exactly that, and in 2024 she published Oh No He Didn’t!: Brilliant Women and the Men Who Took Credit for Their Work. The book recounts the stories of some two dozen women from across history whose groundbreaking contributions to science, medicine, mathematics, technology, and the arts went unrecognized, primarily because the acclaim and awards unjustly went to men instead. Alice Ball, for example, was a chemist who created the first treatment for leprosy, but Murphy writes that after Ball unexpectedly died in 1916, her boss successfully claimed that he was the one responsible for the breakthrough. Then there was the PhD student Candace Pert, who, while working in the lab of Solomon Snyder, created a new technique to look for brain receptors. That led Pert to the important discovery of the opioid receptor, but it was Snyder who was given the prestigious Lasker Award in 1978. (For more examples from Murphy’s book, see the sidebar at right.)

Though nearly all of the stories in Oh No He Didn’t! have been individually told elsewhere, they have for the most part remained little known. Murphy, an adjunct professor at New England Law Boston, said she hopes that compiling them in a single book will help to shine light on the accomplishments of these women, and will highlight the long history of men taking credit for the successes of women. “And some of these stories are not that old,” she pointed out. “This is not a book about how it used to be in the past. This is not an old problem. It’s a continuing problem.”

Murphy said that she’s heard from many female readers who tell her that, like the women in the book, they don’t receive the recognition that is due them for their work. “One of the reasons I loved writing this book,” she said, “is it’s a way of saying to women, ‘You’re not alone.’” ◽