Research Shows Scientific Progress Slowed When Women’s Ideas Were Ignored

Scientific discovery does not happen in a vacuum. It depends on who is allowed to contribute, whose ideas are taken seriously, and how knowledge moves through intellectual communities. New research from Northeastern University makes a strong case that when women were excluded or dismissed, scientific progress itself slowed down. By combining digital humanities, philosophy, and computational social science, the study offers data-driven evidence for something historians have long suspected: ignoring women’s intellectual contributions came at a real cost to science.

At the center of this research is Margaret Cavendish, a 17th-century writer, philosopher, and natural scientist whose ideas were widely known in her lifetime but rarely treated with the respect given to her male contemporaries. By analyzing how her ideas circulated — and how they could have circulated — the research team demonstrates that broader acceptance of women’s work could have led scientific communities to reach accurate conclusions significantly faster.

Who Was Margaret Cavendish and Why She Matters

Margaret Cavendish was far from an obscure figure. She was a poet, philosopher, scientist, playwright, and fiction writer, an unusually wide range even by modern standards. What made her especially remarkable was that she published under her own name at a time when most women writers were anonymous or ignored entirely.

Despite her visibility, Cavendish was often treated dismissively. She earned the nickname “Mad Madge,” a label that reflected how many male intellectuals regarded her — not as a serious thinker, but as a curiosity. Her work was discussed, but it was frequently brushed aside rather than engaged with on its merits. This pattern of visibility without respect is a key theme explored by the researchers.

In 1667, Cavendish became the first woman ever invited to attend a meeting of the Royal Society of England, the world’s oldest continuously operating scientific academy. The Royal Society included figures such as Isaac Newton and Christopher Wren, yet it did not formally admit women as members until 1945. Even today, the institution has never been led by a woman.

The Research Team and Their Approach

The project, titled “New digital methods for understanding the impacts of early women writers on the development of science and philosophy,” brought together scholars from Northeastern University’s campuses in Boston and London. The team included philosophers Peter West and Brian Ball, along with English scholars Sarah Connell and Julia Flanders.

Rather than treating Cavendish as an isolated exception, the researchers used her as a case study to explore how marginalized thinkers influence intellectual communities — and what happens when those thinkers are sidelined.

Brian Ball applied methods from his earlier work on how misinformation spreads through social media networks. Using similar network modeling techniques, the team mapped the intellectual connections between Cavendish and members of the Royal Society. They then created simulations showing how ideas moved through this network over time.

What the Simulations Revealed

One of the most important findings came from a historical counterfactual scenario: what if Cavendish had been better connected and more widely taken seriously during her lifetime?

The simulations tracked when Cavendish published or expressed ideas and compared those moments with changes in opinion among Royal Society fellows. When the model increased her level of influence and connectivity, the results were striking. Not only did Cavendish’s ideas gain traction more quickly, but the entire scientific community reached accurate conclusions faster.

In other words, the exclusion of Cavendish did not just harm her career — it slowed collective scientific understanding. The research shows that intellectual diversity is not just a matter of fairness, but a matter of efficiency and accuracy in knowledge production.

Digital Humanities and the Women Writers Project

A major foundation of this research was Northeastern’s Women Writers Project, a digital archive that has been active since 1988. The project has made 475 historic texts by women available online, covering works written between 1526 and 1850.

These texts are not simply scanned and uploaded. They are hand-transcribed and hand-encoded by students and researchers, allowing for rich layers of information. Readers can see highlighted quotations, structural details, and even notes about the physical condition of the original manuscripts. This level of detail enables advanced computational analysis while preserving historical nuance.

Cavendish was an ideal subject for the study because her work is extraordinarily well represented in the archive. Modeling across the Women Writers Project revealed that she was not just prolific, but distinctive, operating in a wide intellectual space unlike most of her peers.

Rethinking “Exceptional” Women in History

One of the goals of the project was to challenge the tendency to treat women like Cavendish as rare anomalies. According to the researchers, framing her as an outlier misses the larger point. The issue is not that women were incapable of contributing to science and philosophy, but that their contributions were systematically undervalued.

Peter West, who studies marginalized figures in philosophy and edits a journal dedicated to Cavendish’s work, emphasized how digital humanities tools can reshape entrenched narratives. Having richly encoded digital texts is comparable to the difference between using a static paper map and an interactive navigation system — it changes what researchers can see and understand.

Broader Implications for Science Today

The findings resonate far beyond the 17th century. During a symposium linked to the project, experts discussed how women in science continue to face subtle but persistent barriers. These include exclusion from informal networks, lack of recognition, and senior figures taking credit for junior colleagues’ work.

The research underscores a critical point: bias is not just a social problem, it is an epistemic one. When certain voices are excluded, science becomes slower, less robust, and more prone to error.

Why Inclusion Speeds Up Discovery

Modern research in network science supports this conclusion. Diverse and well-connected networks tend to solve problems faster because they introduce alternative perspectives, reduce groupthink, and allow ideas to circulate more freely. The historical case of Margaret Cavendish provides a concrete example of how exclusion undermines these benefits.

By combining historical scholarship with computational modeling, this study adds measurable evidence to discussions about diversity in science. It shows that inclusion is not about rewriting history for modern sensibilities — it is about understanding how knowledge actually develops.

Looking Ahead

The collaboration is expected to result in an academic paper and an online exhibition, further expanding access to this research. More importantly, it sets a precedent for how digital tools can be used to reassess the history of science and philosophy.

The takeaway is clear. When women were ignored, science moved more slowly. Recognizing and correcting these patterns is not just about honoring the past — it is about building better systems of knowledge in the present and future.

Research reference:
https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/12/11/discovering-the-lost-women-of-science/