---
title: "Women in science"
chunk: 11/25
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:38:14.758470+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Immediately after the end of World War II, the country saw a "retrenchment of positions for women" as male veterans returned and began filling open job positions. While men benefited from the opportunities of the G.I. Bill, some women had success with programs such as Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), a women's branch of the US Navy Reserve. The Society of Women Engineers held their first meeting in 1950. Although NASA was established in 1958, women were only admitted to the astronaut program in 1983, 25 years later.
Kay McNulty, Betty Jennings, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Fran Bilas and Ruth Lichterman were six of the original programmers for the ENIAC, the first general purpose electronic computer.
Linda B. Buck is a neurobiologist who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Richard Axel for their work on olfactory receptors.
Rachel Carson was a marine biologist from the United States. She is credited with being the founder of the environmental movement. The biologist and activist  published Silent Spring, a work on the dangers of pesticides, in 1962. The publishing of her environmental science book led to the questioning of usage of harmful pesticides and other chemicals in agricultural settings. This led to a campaign to attempt to ultimately discredit Carson. However, the federal government called for a review of DDT which concluded with DDT being banned. Carson later died from cancer in 1964 at 57 years old.
Eugenie Clark, popularly known as The Shark Lady, was an American ichthyologist known for her research on poisonous fish of the tropical seas and on the behavior of sharks.
Ann Druyan is an American writer, lecturer and producer specializing in cosmology and popular science. Druyan has credited her knowledge of science to the 20 years she spent studying with her late husband, Carl Sagan, rather than formal academic training. She was responsible for the selection of music on the Voyager Golden Record for the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 exploratory missions. Druyan also sponsored the Cosmos 1 spacecraft.
Gertrude B. Elion was an American biochemist and pharmacologist, awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1988 for her work on the differences in biochemistry between normal human cells and pathogens.
Sandra Moore Faber, with Robert Jackson, discovered the Faber–Jackson relation between luminosity and stellar dispersion velocity in elliptical galaxies. She also headed the team which discovered the Great Attractor, a large concentration of mass which is pulling a number of nearby galaxies in its direction.
Zoologist Dian Fossey worked with gorillas in Africa from 1967 until her murder in 1985.
Astronomer Andrea Ghez received a MacArthur "genius grant" in 2008 for her work in surmounting the limitations of earthbound telescopes.
Maria Goeppert Mayer was the second female Nobel Prize winner in Physics, for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus. Earlier in her career, she had worked in unofficial or volunteer positions at the university where her husband was a professor. Goeppert Mayer is one of several scientists whose works are commemorated by a U.S. postage stamp.
Sulamith Low Goldhaber and her husband Gerson Goldhaber formed a research team on the K meson and other high-energy particles in the 1950s.
Carol Greider and the Australian born Elizabeth Blackburn, along with Jack W. Szostak, received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase.
Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper developed the first computer compiler while working for the Eckert Mauchly Computer Corporation, released in 1952.
Deborah S. Jin's team at JILA, in Boulder, Colorado, in 2003 produced the first fermionic condensate, a new state of matter.
Stephanie Kwolek, a researcher at DuPont, invented poly-paraphenylene terephthalamide – better known as Kevlar.
Lynn Margulis is a biologist best known for her work on endosymbiotic theory, which is now generally accepted for how certain organelles were formed.
Barbara McClintock's studies of maize genetics demonstrated genetic transposition in the 1940s and 1950s. Before then, McClintock obtained her PhD from Cornell University in 1927. Her discovery of transposition provided a greater understanding of mobile loci within chromosomes and the ability for genetics to be fluid. She dedicated her life to her research, and she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1983. McClintock was the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize that was not shared by anyone else. McClintock is one of several scientists whose works are commemorated by a U.S. postage stamp.
Nita Ahuja is a renowned surgeon-scientist known for her work on CIMP in cancer, she is currently the chief of surgical oncology at Johns Hopkins Hospital. First woman ever to be the chief of this prestigious department.
Carolyn Porco is a planetary scientist best known for her work on the Voyager program and the Cassini–Huygens mission to Saturn. She is also known for her popularization of science, in particular space exploration.
Physicist Helen Quinn, with Roberto Peccei, postulated Peccei-Quinn symmetry. One consequence is a particle known as the axion, a candidate for the dark matter that pervades the universe. Quinn was the first woman to receive the Dirac Medal by the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) and the first to receive the Oskar Klein Medal.
Lisa Randall is a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, best known for her work on the Randall–Sundrum model. She was the first tenured female physics professor at Princeton University.
Sally Ride was an astrophysicist and the first American woman, and then-youngest American, to travel to outer space. Ride wrote or co-wrote several books on space aimed at children, with the goal of encouraging them to study science. Ride participated in the Gravity Probe B (GP-B) project, which provided more evidence that the predictions of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity are correct.
Through her observations of galaxy rotation curves, astronomer Vera Rubin discovered the Galaxy rotation problem, now taken to be one of the key pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter. She was the first female allowed to observe at the Palomar Observatory.
Sara Seager is a Canadian-American astronomer who is currently a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and known for her work on extrasolar planets.
Astronomer Jill Tarter is best known for her work on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Tarter was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine in 2004. She is the former director of SETI.
Rosalyn Yalow was the co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (together with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally) for development of the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique.