Talk to me while we walk.

I drew 10 of the original historical American Girls in my style! This was a fun little fan art series in between my other illustrations 🤭

There was a brief period in 2021 (the “great resignation”) where it was an employee’s market, but because a lot of people changed jobs, while a small fraction of industries were able to tempt skilled employees with good salaries and benefits in order to hire and appear healthily in growth mode, the question of raises fell to the wayside even more than usual. Especially because this happened during Covid—at the time a lot of employers just completely stopped offering cost of living adjustment raises as an “emergency response” to the economy. And then…they just never picked them back up. Every year became a “challenging year” and it was normalized for a shaken-up workforce that you wouldn’t get a modest increase in wages annually. While a lot of industries especially the ones most visibly in need of wage reform like food service have had static wages for decades, a lot of our workforce in places like public service, education, manufacturing/engineering, and mid-level white collar jobs, the types of careers that, at bare minimum, exist of offset the initial investment a huge part of our generation in America has made into the 4-year college system, were able to keep their heads above water more easily if they landed a job that would at least kind of take care of their needs in this regard. It was considered a dealbreaker for many people looking to switch careers if that wasn’t offered.

I think when we talk about raises and upward mobility we associate it with middle class people making the jump from lower mid to upper mid; this is really the only major type of class mobility that exists in America. You might grow up with parents who have no savings, and eventually become the type of person who can save and take their kids to Disneyland. It’s kind of hard to see this being denied to people as a crisis given that poverty is inescapable. However I think the type of slow decline in wage stability relative to inflation is extremely scary because it actually means many people are backsliding out of even being lower middle class without realizing it. In the grand scheme of things this is a less urgent wage crisis than what effects hourly wage workers, but because of that I think a lot of people don’t realize it’s effecting them, and feel guilty or frustrated when they have what looks like a stable career and feel something slip away from them.

For example: my second salaried job out of college was at the corporate packaging & purchasing department of a major dairy supplier in Buffalo. I made $45k plus benefits in 2018, a major raise from the $15/hr I’d been making before. People in that office had had careers at the company that lasted 15, 20 years, and relied partially on a steady, expected annual reassessment and cost of living raise. Without it, their stability their salary offered them would drift away slightly every year. This is bad for many reasons, but particularly because when you grow a career somewhere, it’s likely your life grows with you in terms of costs: you start a family, maybe need to take care of your elderly parents eventually.

What I hear anecdotally though this has changed radically in almost all career fields. There is no guarantee wage increases will ever be normalized again to the degree they were pre-Covid, and inflation has increased roughly 23% since 2021. The $45k I made in 2018 is worth $33k now. That is simply true. Let’s assume that company was generous enough to raise that salary commensurate with inflation to $50k by 2021. If they had done that yearly to meet the economic realities by 2026, that person should be making $61,000. But they’re not. They’re making the material equivalent of half of that, basically. That is a massive, mind-boggling gap, and has nothing to do with the role itself, just the value of money, and a lot of people who entered the workforce in the 2020s have no idea just how much they are being denied because (like I was in 2018!) they’re in their early 20s and happy to have a salaried job. But while that salary bought me my first car and enabled me to do things like host people who weren’t able to have stable housing at my apartment, it is simply not offering that to people today.

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.