This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Coastal Carolina chapter.
There are countless women in STEM who history has neglected. In this article, I share with you some, but not all, of the forgotten or underappreciated women in STEM fields who deserve more recognition and awareness, as well as links to other sources where you can read more about them and others.
Medicine:
- According to The College of St. Scholastica, the first woman to earn a doctorate of medicine was Elizabeth Blackwell. She was an abolitionist, and her efforts were dismissed by the male dominated USSC, so she created the WRCA.
- According to International Women’s Day, Rebecca Cole was a doctor and hygiene reformer. She examined inner city families and death rates. She was the second Black woman to become a doctor in the United States.
- Marci Bowers is a gynecologist and surgeon. According to her website, she “is acknowledged as a pioneer in the field of Gender Affirmation Surgery and is the first woman worldwide to hold a personal transgender history while performing transgender surgery. She is also the first US surgeon to learn the technique of functional clitoral restoration after Female Genital Mutilation/cutting (FGM/c).”
- Henrietta Lacks’s cells were being taken without consent and exploited for research. Her cells are called HeLa cells and, according to John Hopkins, “are used to study the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones and viruses on the growth of cancer cells without experimenting on humans.” Her cells have even been used in studies regarding COVID-19: read more about that and her here.
Science—Physics, Mathematics, Astronomy:
- Mae C. Jeminson was a doctor and astronaut. After being a doctor, she decided to change her career. She was the first African-American woman to be admitted to NASA’s space program in 1987 and the first African-American woman to space travel in 1992.
- Chien-Shiung Wu was a physicist on the Manhattan Project. She has been called the “First Lady of Physics.” She did research where she disproved the “principle of conservation of parity.” According to the source above, both of her male colleagues went on to receive a Nobel Prize in 1957, while Wu’s contributions went unrecognized.
- Katherine Johnson was a NASA scientist and mathematician whose work was essential to the success of the first humans in space from the United States. She calculated the paths for spaceflight around the earth to land on the moon. She lived to be 101 years old, passing away last year.
Computer Science:
- Lynn Conway made possible the creation of the first true superscalar computer. She was fired for being transgender, but remained influential in stem and continued her career.
- Audrey Tang, according to her Wikipedia page, is a “Taiwanese free software programmer and minister without portfolio of Taiwan, who has been described as one of the ‘ten greatest Taiwanese computing personalities.’” According to her LinkedIn page, she “served on Taiwan’s national development council’s open data committee and K-12 curriculum committee; and led the country’s first e-Rulemaking project.” She is involved extensively in politics as well.
Ecological Science:
- According to her website, Robin Wall Kimmerer is “a mother, scientist, decorated professor, and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.” She is the published author of Braiding Sweetgrass and Gathering Moss. She focuses on “not only restoration of ecological communities, but restoration of our relationships to land.”
These are just a select few of the many women who deserve more recognition and appreciation. You can read more about women of color in stem here. There is also a Wikipedia page dedicated to African American women in stem fields. You can read about other LGBTQ+ stem folks, including Sally Ride, here and here.