Can you name five leaders in the STEM fields in under a minute? Try now.
Who did you think of? How many of them were men? Were any of them women?
The United Nations celebrates the International Day of Girls and Women in Science on 11th February to recognise contributions made by women in science, technology and mathematics; recognitions ignored mainly in popular narratives. It also aims to shed light on the unequal opportunities girls have to study and/or practice in STEM fields.
But who do aspiring girls in STEM look up to? Here are fourteen amazing women in STEM who’ve done groundbreaking work in their fields. They’re here to fill the dire need for role models for women STEM aspirants!
Kamala Sohonie: The first Indian woman to receive a PhD in a scientific discipline (in 1939), Kamala Sohonie was met with rejection by Dr Raman when applying for a research grant at the (Indian Institute of Science) IISC for being a woman. She held a satyagraha to demand her right to the grant and then faced many challenges as the first woman researcher at the IISC. Overcoming these, studied the benefits of neera as a low-cost healthy nutritional supplement for pregnant women. Sohonie’s success in this research earned her the Rashtrapati Award.
Anna Mani: Renowned Indian physicist and meteorologist, Anna Mani served as the Deputy Director General of the Indian Meteorological Department and a visiting professor at the Raman Institute in Bangalore. She made several contributions to meteorological instrumentation, intending to make India independent in the field. She has standardised the drawings for over a hundred instruments and published numerous research papers on solar radiation, ozone and wind energy measurements.
Marie Curie: A name that needs no introduction, Marie Curie is the go-to feminist icon for women in STEM. The Nobel Laureate discovered polonium and radium and set a strong foundation for research on radioactivity. But did you know that the Nobel Committee almost neglected this physicist and chemist? They initially only planned to honour only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel. Still, a committee member who was an advocate for women scientists, mathematician Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler, alerted Pierre to the situation. It was only after his complaint that Marie’s name was included.
Elizabeth Blackwell: Pioneering British physician Elizabeth Blackwell was integral in promoting education for women in medicine, both in the UK and USA. Rejected by most medical schools due to her sex, Blackwell finally became the first woman to attend medical school in the USA after being accepted by the then Geneva Medical College. Despite being an accomplished medical professional, she got very few patients, further pushing her down the path of social justice and reform. Blackwell founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children with her sister Emily Blackwell in 1857 and began giving lectures to female audiences on the importance of educating girls. She also played a significant role in organising nurses during the American Civil War.
Chien-Shiung Wu: The “Queen of Nuclear Research”, Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American experimental and particle physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project, helping separate uranium into its different isotopes. She also conducted the famous Wu Experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved, for which her other two male colleagues were awarded that Nobel Prize. Nonetheless, her expertise in experimental physics won her the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.
Dr Indira Hinduja: This gynaecologist, obstetrician and infertility specialist pioneered the Gamete intrafallopian transfer (GIFT) in India, delivering the first Indian GIFT baby in 1988. Before this, she mastered the pathbreaking oocyte donation technique for menopausal and premature ovarian failure patients, giving the country’s first baby out of this technique on 24 January 199. She has been helping many couples with fertility problems have children ever since.
Dorothy Hodgkin: This Nobel Prize-winning British chemist has discovered some unique phenomena such as the structure of Vitamin B12, three-dimensional biomolecular structures, confirming the structure of penicillin, and most notably, the structure of insulin. Her work advanced the technique of X-ray crystallography, now essential to structural biology.
Janaki Ammal: Padmashree Awardee Janaki Ammal is a leader in Indian botany. She worked on plant breeding, cytogenetics, and phytogeography, most notably in bamboos and brinjals. She also worked on the cytogenetics of a range of plants and co-authored the Chromosome Atlas of Cultivated Plants (1945) with C.D. Darlington. Much of Janaki Ammal’s work was conducted on the Kerala rainforests, and the economic and medical value of its plants, due to her interest in ethnobotany.
Katherine Johnson: The brilliant African-American mathematician Katherine Johnson’s calculations of orbital mechanics when working in NASA was critical to the success of NASA’s crewed spaceships. Her work towards calculating orbits, trajectories etc., in space is too vast to be summed up in one paragraph, but it was integral to the Space Shuttle Program, the Apollo Lunar Module, and Project Mercury. The “human computer” had the tremendous mathematical capability and ability to work with space trajectories with such limited technology and recognition in her time.
Augusta Ada King: The Countess of Lovelace, Augusta Ada King, was an English mathematician and writer. She is best known for her work on Charles Babbage’s proposed computer, a general-purpose mechanical machine. Augusta was the first to recognise that the device could be used for more than calculation and created the first computer algorithm to be used on such a machine. She is thus often regarded as the first programmer.
Radia Perlman: Computer programmer and network engineer Radia Perlman invented the Spanning-Tree Protocol (STP), which is fundamental in operating network bridges. Perlman was also the chief designer of DECnet, IV and V protocols, and IS-IS. She has also made significant contributions to the Connectionless Network Protocol (CLNP). This OSI network layer datagram service does not require a circuit to be established before data is transmitted and routes messages to their destinations independently of any other messages.
Tu Youyou: Chinese pharmaceutical chemist Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize for her door opening discovery of artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, the breakthroughs in treating malaria in twentieth-century tropical medicine. This has saved millions of lives in Asia, Africa and South America. Youyou is the first Chinese Nobel Laureate in physiology or medicine and studied, lived and conducted her research exclusively in the country.
Sabrina Gonzales Patserski: Self-described “proud first-generation Cuban-American and Chicago Public Schools alumna,” Pasterski was the #3 Trending Scientist for all of 2017. At twenty-four, she was already cited by the likes of Stephen Hawking and dubbed the next Einstein. At ten, the theoretical physicist had already built an aeroplane engine and built a complete functioning aeroplane only two years later. After graduating at the top of her class with a 5.0 Grade Point Average (GPA) from the Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT), she was a PhD candidate in Physics at Harvard University at a mere twenty-one.
Maryam Mirzakhani: This Iranian mathematician was honoured in Popular Science’s fourth annual “Brilliant 10”, acknowledged as one of the top ten young minds to have pushed their fields in innovative directions. Mirzakhani’s work in “the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces” also earned her the Fields Medal. She became the first Iranian to be awarded this most prestigious mathematics award. Last year on the International Day for Girls and Women in STEM, the UN listed as one of seven female scientists dead or alive who have shaped the world.
These are just a few names of the innumerable pioneering women who have shaped and helped further scientific discoveries and thought. Many still have not gotten their due credit, and many continue to broaden women’s horizons in STEM. Add to this list and give children more women role models in STEM to show them that science is not just for the boys.
