“If your mom is a feminist, you need to buy her my book. If your mom isn’t a feminist, you DEFINITELY need to buy her my book!” ‘Uncredited’ - An Interview with Allison Tyra
Allison Tyra is the founder of the website “Infinite Women”, a biographical database sharing the stories of over 6500 women throughout history, and more recently, the author of the upcoming book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work. Infinite Women was founded by Allison in 2020 to “celebrate women from different spheres of influence, around the world and across the centuries” and her website acts as an encyclopaedia of women’s history throughout time. On the website, you can discover the stories of thousands of women from a variety of different backgrounds such as politics, music, religion, and equality to name but a few.
Allison’s debut book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work is an extension of Infinite Women and tells over 600 stories encompassing thousands of women and their uncredited or stolen work, ranging from fields such as science, the arts, business, and sports. With other books in the pipeline, Uncredited is the first of several books by Allison sharing the hidden histories of women throughout the world and throughout time.
I recently interviewed Allison about Uncredited on topics ranging from what the research process looked like, to discussing the manosphere and whether now is a pivotal time for research on this topic to come out. To hear more from Allison, visit the Infinite Women website and check out her podcast on all things women’s history!
Uncredited covers over 600 stories of women throughout history and around the world. That’s a lot of women! What did the research process look like to identify these women? Where did you start looking, and how did you discover their stories?
I’ve actually said that I don’t know of any way that someone could set out to actively research this topic, other than I guess you could start with reading my book! But the whole point is that these are stories that have been hidden in a variety of ways, and I really wanted to focus on the fact that I saw the same stories pop up over and over again on the Infinite Women biographical database. Currently I have over 6500 biographies on this site across all different fields, industries, throughout history, all over the world, and when you tell these stories in isolation – that is extremely important. I’m not trying to dimmish that at all because my work would be impossible without the amazing scholars who go through all the boxes to uncover these in the first place. But when you see these stories in isolation it’s very easy to say, “oh that sucks for her!” or “them” if it’s a group of women, but it doesn’t give you the scope, it doesn’t show you how this is happening to women across that huge range that I mentioned. It doesn’t only happen to women in the arts or the sciences, or it doesn’t only happen to women in one time period or in one country.
Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed and Stolen Work by Allison Tyra.
For more information on the book and to pre-order, please use this link.
One of the correlations you could look at is women being kept out of medical schools in the late 1800s to early 1900s. But as recently as 2018, a scandal broke in Japan that at least 10 medical schools were deliberately downgrading women applicant test scores to keep them from being admitted. At the time, less than 22% of Japan’s medical field of doctors were women. You even see the same arguments being used – some of them tried to claim that it was because women are just going to have babies and then drop out of the field which, first off, is just as dumb now as it was over 100 years ago, it’s just a stupid argument and it always has been. Another argument was that women did better in the interview portion. Women are better communicators and so it’s not fair to the men, so we have to sabotage their test scores. I’m sorry, do you not think that being a good communicator, while it certainly shouldn’t be the only factor, but being a good communicator is an important aspect of being a doctor? Maybe you shouldn’t be treating this like a golf game! Again, that came out in 2018 and they had been doing this for years. So that’s another aspect – we have no way of knowing how many of these things are going on right now because so much of this stuff doesn’t come out until, not just decades after it happens, but decades after the people die. I know it’s not terribly helpful if someone asks, “how can I research this” and I’m like “I don’t know!” For me it was very much making a deliberate effort as I was doing my regular work with Infinite Women. Make a note, make a note, make a note, and eventually it’s like “maybe I should actually turn these notes into a book”, and I did!
It’s ridiculous to think that it can still be happening now as well!
A lot of the examples are from the 2010s and 2020s. Even the whole “men stealing their wife’s work”. When Dan Brown and his wife got divorced one of the things that she sued over was basically saying that she had the original idea for at least one of his books, including The Da Vinci Code, but also that she was the one doing all this research. If you have read The Da Vinci Code you will know how much of it is based on what would have needed to be researched, like all of the artwork that you could only think of if you have done the research.
That’s blown my mind. When I initially saw Uncredited, I assumed that this would be from the ancient, medieval times, and throughout history. Not necessarily stories from today!
There are! It goes back to ancient Egypt. But this shit is still happening. There’s a bunch. There’s a Hungarian swimmer, Katinka Hosszú, who won the world championships and the announcers cut away from her to her husband/coach in the stands and were like “and there’s the guy who’s responsible for her transformation!” She had been winning international competitions since she was a teenager, long before she met him, and he (her husband/coach) sucked! In a lot of ways! First off, he was only a year older than her and was not an elite swimmer like her, he was basically a failed swimmer in his own right! Then when she dumped him as both her coach and her husband, he tried to delete her Facebook page. There’s another story about when he was coaching literal children and at a swim meet where his trainees were competing, he burst into profanity screaming “fuck you” at officials at an event for literal children. And so, this whole idea that you’ve got the announcers proclaiming that they’re giving him credit for her victory, and it’s just like “okay let’s break that down a bit shall we!”
Unfortunately, there are quite a lot of examples and I’ve even said that I can’t imagine anyone who identifies as female or anyone who has any lived experience as female reading this book and not relating to at least a couple of things in the book.
“Some of them tried to claim that it was because women are just going to have babies and then drop out of the field which, first off, it just as dumb now as it was over 100 years ago, and it’s just a stupid argument”
Were there certain texts you found incredibly useful for this topic, such as biographies or diaries?
Nope! Again, because it’s very much breadth, not depth,there are over 1300 citations in this book! Oh my God, the line edit was so painful! But again, that’s the whole thing. If this was something where there were already existing texts that went in depth on this topic on the level I am looking at it…there’s so many people who have done the research that enabled me to write this. But they were looking at one woman or a group of women and when I say over 600 stories, that actually encompasses thousands of women. There are groups like the ENIAC Programmers who made the first computer actually work, or the Edinburgh Seven who fought to be able to attend medical school, and the Steam Boat Ladies. In the early 1900s Oxford and Cambridge were letting women attend university, do all the work, presumably pay through the nose, but then they wouldn’t actually give them the degrees. Even if the women had fulfilled all the requirements, and this is also a recurring theme. Universities are in the book a lot and usually not in a good way! Whether it’s students, or when they’re trying to find jobs as academics or scientists. At this time, Cambridge, Oxford, and Trinity College in Dublin had reciprocity, so students could transfer, and their credits would count. And so, the president of Trinity College said, “why don’t we just give these women the degrees that they’ve earned?” 720 women, approximately, would get on the steamboat to go to Dublin, show their transcript, and be handed a degree (or more likely mailed one later!). So that’s one story but 720 women and it’s why I’m strict on saying more than 600 stories.
My subsequent books, because last year I signed a contract for 3 additional books and so I’m avoiding doing the line edit for A View From the Hill which is a celebration of women who made their mark after 40. So that’s over 300 women across all these different fields and again, I don’t know how you would set out to find that. I did Google listicles to see if there’s anyone major that I missed, but we don’t have these collections existing en masse. In fact, the name Infinite Women came out of listicles because you’ll very often see “10 women artists you haven’t heard of” or “5 women scientists who changed the world” but there’s never just 10 women, there’s never just 5 women. A View From the Hill comes out in May 2026 (include link here). My publisher agreed on three books, but I emailed back and said, “I actually have 20 ideas and have had 2 more since I sent you that email!”. We’re looking at this as a book a year to be mutually agreed upon in similar veins. Currently the front runner for the fourth book is Singular Mothers about single moms.
The first quarter of Uncredited is all about documentation and gatekeeping. Documentation is so privileged at every step, not just what gets documented in the first place but what gets saved and what gets presented to the public. I describe it as a multi-tiered sieve where you’re just losing women’s stories at each step and so all we get is this tiny little trickle.
Uncredited stems from research that went into creating the Infinite Women website. Was there a particular story that prompted you to start writing the book, or was it a culmination of stories that you wanted to document in one piece of work?
It was definitely seeing the same stories over and over again. And that’s the whole point – it’s not just one story. So, like I was saying with the listicles, there’s never just X number of women whatever the category is, and similarly there’s never just one woman who experiences this. Each woman experienced it in her own particular context, but what was happening to her was happening to other women, regardless of the factor. There’s no “oh this only happened once to one person”.
“I can’t imagine anyone who identifies as female or anyone who has any lived experience as female reading this book and not relating to at least a couple of things.”
The blurb of Uncredited mentions that the book “explored why women have not been properly acknowledged for their accomplishments, both historically and today.” Have you noticed a main culprit for who stole women’s work, such as husbands or colleagues? Did any other patterns emerge? Has this changed over time?
Husbands and bosses, some are colleagues or at the same level. A lot of them are husbands who are also colleagues/bosses. There are some good men! I told my husband that I want to write a book about the good men and he said, “oh so a pamphlet!” But I do try to shout out the good men where I can. For a contemporary example; the photo of the black hole. The face of it was the team leader, Katie Bouman, because she looked adorable, and I don’t mean to be diminishing her when I say that but she has got her hands clasped over mouth, and is clearly young and looks so excited. It is endearing, so of course a lot of misogynists latched on to this guy on her team, Andrew Chael, saying “HE’S actually the one who wrote all the code, and the feminists are just trying to give her credit because she’s a woman”. Andrew Chael took to Twitter and straight up said “no – this isn’t true and if you’re trying to use me to belittle Katie rethink what you’re doing with your life.” He was not having it.
Katie Bouman celebrating her algorithm.
More information can be found here.
Alice Ball was the first African American woman to get a PhD in chemistry and to teach chemistry at the University of Hawaii. Unfortunately, she died when she was only 24 possibly due to exposure from the lab. But before she died, she created the only effective treatment for leprosy in the early 1900s. She was studying the kava plant for her dissertation and found a way to make the oil injectable and able to be absorbed by the body. It wasn’t a cure, and it didn’t stop the progress indefinitely, but it was the only effective treatment and sulphonamides came around in the 1940s. When she died, her boss, who later became Dean of the College and University President at the University of Hawaii, stole her work. He did some additional trials, published it, didn’t give her any credit at all, and named it after himself. A male colleague did try to stand up for her at the time which is of course a lot harder because she was dead.
I think this is why its very easy to say that all bosses, all landlords and all cops are assholes because positions of power often attract people who want to abuse that power. And so that is what it comes down to. All of these men, whether it was because they were a husband, whether it was because of their position in the workplace, they had the power that they could abuse to steal these women’s work. That’s what I see over and over again; it’s power. And that hasn’t changed. It’s harder to do it now and I think a lot of that is because we have a lot more documentation. A lot more is done by chat and email, we all have video and audio recorders on our phones which is in our hands most of the time. Even if I’m doing things on Google Docs, you can track who is making edits and the progression of those edits. So, if I’m having to go to court I can show “I created this document on this date”. We also have a lot more avenues to get the word out if this happens, so it is a lot harder to successfully hide this kind of behaviour when it’s that overt unless you have the power. Unless you can force the other person into complicity, which I believe we are still seeing plenty of and it’s going to come out in decades. I don’t think that it has stopped, but you have to be in a position of power so you can force that complicity.
With conversations taking place surrounding the “manosphere”, particularly in the UK, do you think now is a pivotal time for this book to come out?
I think that the people who most need to read my book will never read my book. When we’re talking about the manosphere the fundamental issue with most forms of misogyny, in my opinion, they are fundamentally illogical. The version of reality that the manosphere spins is in no way based in reality, there’s not factual basis for the bullshit that they spin, if any of it. It does not match reality and in order to buy into that you have to close yourself off to reality, to facts to other peoples’ lived experiences, and you have to close yourself off to empathy.
Fundamentally the people who read my book are interested in other people’s stories, even if you are someone for whom you will see your own life reflected in different ways, in which case I’m sorry! And you’re welcome? Because it’s good to know that you’re not alone and that’s one of the things I think is important about the book is that as women we are very often gaslit, and I think this is especially true for autistic women like me, we are constantly gaslit into being told that we are the problem, particularly when we are trying to raise a problem. This is something that has come up in a conversation that actually went out this week about the manosphere in the classroom (which you can listen to on Spotify here or read the transcript here).
The researcher I was talking to, Dr Samantha Schulz, was saying that one of the issues is these teachers feel like it is happening in a vacuum. They feel isolated and it is crazy making. Gaslighting implies that you are the unreasonable one for finding this behaviour unacceptable. So I wish this book is not as relevant as it is, and I do think that we need to be talking about and addressing the manosphere. My understanding is that it was particularly heightened due to the isolation that most of the world experienced during Covid as we were not having nearly as much in-person engagement and people were turning to digital spaces. But this misogyny has always been here and so I don’t know if this is a more pivotal time than any other time that we’ve had. I don’t know to what extent the misogyny is worse or if it has just changed shape.
Because it has taken on a digital facet now?
Yes, but how much of it is they’re feel emboldened to say the quiet part out loud as opposed to they always felt this way? Which is sort of what I feel with a lot of things about Trump, the racism, the sexism, all of that was already there its just that he emboldened bigots to be more public and open about their bigotry. You know that saying about “may you live in interesting times” being both a blessing and a curse? I would rather not be living in such interesting times!
Finally, were there any stories that did not make the book that you really wanted to include?
No, but, I have like 10 pages of notes and growing because my editor said that I can’t add any more because it is a static medium…eugh! There’s a lot of women like Yayoi Kusama, the artist, who is actually in my next book. She’s in A View From the Hill and there’s a lot of overlap because some women didn’t make it until their later years which is because of factors that you’ll read about in Uncredited. There’s all these through-lines. In Yayoi Kusama’s case, she was working in the 1960s in New York and she’s Japanese and white guys kept getting famous for duplicating her work and it got to the point where she wasn’t finding successes, but these guys were by ripping off what she was doing. She checked herself into a mental health facility back in Japan and she still lives there to this day. She started making art again and came back into the public eye decades later. She’s now had huge exhibitions in at least three Australian cities that I can think of, big, large-scale exhibitions where she is the main attraction. Similarly, in More than Her Disability I’ve got one on single moms that I’m working on. Any group where there’s not already a book with hundreds of these women in one place, and it’s a group of women that people tend to not expect too much of, or tend to look down on, I will write that book!
You do see a lot of these connections where I wish I had known about that part of Yayoi Kusama’s story before I reached the point of no return. I am making all of those notes and maybe at some point I’ll get to do an extended edition which will be twice as long and will have over 2000 footnotes! More footnotes! That’s exactly what this needs!
We can do this again next year when your next book comes out!
And the year after that!
Thank you to Allison for such an interesting discussion on women’s history and Uncredited which is available to pre-order now!