This Women’s History Month, it’s important to recognize and appreciate women who made history in the STEM field and the long-lasting impacts of their discoveries. Their life stories are crucial to their paths of discovery and innovation, but it’s hard to memorize the life stories of so many incredible women, so I’ve compiled a sentence about each woman’s contribution to their field.
Joy Adamson– A conservationist, naturalist and author, who lived in Kenya raised a lion cub after her husband killed its mother, writing the book Born Free about this experience.
Maria Agnesi– An Italian mathematician and leader in calculus, who was the first woman to write a book about mathematics and be a mathematics professor.
Agnodice– She was a physician and gynecologist in Athens, who is known as the first female midwife and is said to have dressed like a man because women were not allowed to practice medicine at the time.
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson– The first woman physician in Great Britain and a surgeon, she founded a hospital staffed by women and became the first woman elected as mayor.
Elizabeth Blackwell– Another impressive Elizabeth, she was a British citizen who became the first woman to graduate from a medical school in the United States and opened her own medical college for women.
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi– A French virologist who played a key role in identifying HIV as the cause of AIDS, earning her the Nobel Prize in 2008.
Clara Barton– Famous for her work as a Civil War nurse, she led the way in the field of nursing and founded the American Red Cross to help with disaster relief.
Ruth Benedict– An American anthropologist who taught at Columbia and forged ahead in cultural anthropology, writing a World War II pamphlet about how differences between races are not rooted in science.
Elizabeth Britton– A botanist who played a crucial role in founding and fundraising for the New York Botanical Garden, also laying the foundation for future conservation research.
Harriet Brooks– An incredible Canadian woman who’s been compared to Marie Curie, she was Canada’s first female nuclear scientist, studying radioactivity and discovering radon.
Rachel Carson– My personal idol, she was a marine biologist and conservationist who prompted the modern ecological movement and wrote a book called Silent Spring exposing the dangers of DDT and other chemicals like it.
Eva Crane– A researcher of bees, she spent decades traveling and studying the life of bees, completely changing from her past training as a quantum mathematician after discovering her passion for beekeeping.
Annie Easley– An African American rocket scientist and computer scientist who was a key part of the team developing software for the Centaur rocket stage in the field of the first computers.
Rosalind Franklin– An English chemist who played a key role in discovering the helical structure of DNA after developing the first photograph of DNA, and wasn’t recognized for this accomplishment during her lifetime.
Caroline Herschel– A German astronomer, best known as the first woman to discover a comet, and later went on to do the research with her brother to discover Uranus.
Inge Lehmann– A Danish seismologist and geologist whose work led to the discovery that earth’s core is solid rather than liquid as was previously thought.
Elena Piscopia– She was an Italian philosopher and mathematician, the first known woman to earn a doctoral degree, and studied philosophy and theology, but was blocked by the church from studying it further.
Sally Ride– The first American woman in space, she was an astronaut and physicist, and the youngest American astronaut.
There are thousands of women who paved the way in the world of science but are often overlooked and seen as less important than the men in the field. During this month, let’s all give some extra appreciation to the women who made important contributions to whatever field you study.