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The big list of women who did things

Unfinished, obviously.

Last updated: 2023-03-21

Art

  • Aphra Behn: one of the first English women to earn her living by her writing
  • Tina Bell: pioneer of the "grunge" music genre, before Nirvana
  • Diemoth: 12th-century recluse who transcribed at least forty-five manuscripts; notable for her "beautiful handwriting"
  • Enheduanna: first known poet
  • Herrad of Landsberg: 12th-century nun who wrote an early pictoral encyclopedia, Hortus deliciarum, to teach the women in her convent about the sciences of the time
  • Murasaki Shikibu: wrote the first novel, The Tale of Genji
  • Valerie Thomas: invented the illusion transmitter, critical for the invention of 3D movies

Computers

  • Ada Lovelace: the first computer programmer
  • Kathleen Booth: inventor of assembly language
  • Evelyn Berezin: designed the first computer word proecssor
  • Edith Clarke: first woman to earn a degree in electrical engineering
  • Margaret Hamilton: lead programmer on the Apollo project
  • Grace Hopper: created the first compiler for a programming language
  • Susan Kare: "pioneer of pixel art"; designed many of the icons, fonts, and images for Apple, NeXT, and IBM in the 1980s
  • Hedy Lamarr: invented Wi-Fi
  • Ruth Teitelbaum: one of the six women who programmed ENIAC
  • Gladys West: mathematician who developed the satellite geodesy models eventually developed into the Global Positioning System (GPS)

More information

Industry

Medicine

Science

  • Patricia Bath: inventor of the Laserphaco Probe
  • Ethel Bauer: planned lunar trajectories for the Apollo program, critical to 13's safe return
  • Jocelyn Bell Burnell: discovered first pulsar
  • Annie Jump Cannon: developed the first stellar classification system; classified almost 400,000 stars
  • Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: discovered what stars are made out of
  • Mary Jackson: NASA's first Black female engineer
  • Mae Jemison: first Black woman in space
  • Katherine Johnson: mathematician crucial for the success of the first USA spaceflights
  • Mary Kenner: inventor of the menstrual pad; holder of the record for the most patents awarded to a Black woman in the USA
  • Inge Lehmann: discovered the Earth has a solid inner core
  • Lise Meitner: discovered nuclear fission
  • Mary Sherman Morgan: invented hydyne (a liquid rocket fuel)
  • Cecilia Payne: discovered what the universe and sun are made of
  • Clarice Phelps: part of the team that discovered element 117 (tennessine); first Black woman involved with the discovery of a chemical element
  • Vera Rubin: discovered dark matter
  • Seondeok of Silla: set up first astronomy tower in Asia
  • Donna Strickland: winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize in Physics for the practical implementation of chirped pulse amplification
  • Judy Sullivan: biomedical engineer for the Apollo 11 spaceflight
  • Maria Telkes: co-built first solar-power-heated heated home with Eleanor Raymond
  • Marie Tharp: mapped the floor of the Atlantic Ocean; proved the theory of continential drift
  • Chien-Shiung Wu: first woman to become president of the American Physical Society; worked on the Manhattan Project and proved that parity is not conserved
  • ...and many more

Social Change

  • Claudette Colvin: pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement; efused to give up her bus seat nine months before Rosa Parks did
  • Temple Grandin: one of the first public figures to publically come out as Autistic; animal welfare activist that campaigned for humane treatment of cattle in beef processing plants
  • Judith Heumann: held the longest sit-in in a government building for the enactment of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (civil rights protection for disabled people)

Misc