---
title: "Timeline of women in science"
chunk: 10/16
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women_in_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:04:23.558030+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

1940: Turkish Archaeologist, Sumerologist, Assyriologist, and writer Muazzez İlmiye Çığ. Upon receiving her degree in 1940, she began a multi-decade career at Museum of the Ancient Orient, one of three such institutions comprising Istanbul Archaeology Museums, as a resident specialist in the field of cuneiform tablets, thousands of which were being stored untranslated and unclassified in the facility's archives. In the intervening years, due to her efforts in the deciphering and publication of the tablets, the museum became a Middle Eastern languages learning center attended by ancient history researchers from every part of the world.
1941: American scientist Ruth Smith Lloyd became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in anatomy.
1942: Austrian-American actress and inventor Hedy Lamarr and composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers. Although the US Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s, the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi. This work led to their induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014.
1942: American geologist Marguerite Williams became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in geology in the United States. She completed her doctorate, entitled A History of Erosion in the Anacostia Drainage Basin, at Catholic University.
1942: Native American aerospace engineer Mary Golda Ross became employed at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, where she provided troubleshooting for military aircraft. She went on to work for NASA, developing operational requirements, flight plans, and a Planetary Flight Handbook for spacecraft missions such as the Apollo program.
1943: British geologist Eileen Guppy was promoted to the rank of assistant geologist, therefore becoming the first female geology graduate appointed to the scientific staff of the British Geological Survey.
1943: American geologist and crystallographer Elizabeth A. Wood became the first female to be hired as a member of the technical staff (MTS) at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey.
1944: Indian chemist Asima Chatterjee became the first Indian woman to receive a doctorate of science, completing her studies at the University of Calcutta. She went on to establish the Department of Chemistry at Lady Brabourne College.
1945: American physicists and mathematicians Frances Spence, Ruth Teitelbaum, Marlyn Meltzer, Betty Holberton, Jean Bartik and Kathleen Antonelli programmed the electronic general-purpose computer ENIAC, becoming some of the world's first computer programmers. (The first were uncredited operators, mostly members of the Women's Royal Naval Service, of the Colossus computer in 1943–1945, but that machine was not a stored-program computer and its existence was a state secret until the 1970s.)
1945: Marjory Stephenson and Kathleen Lonsdale were elected as the first female Fellows of the Royal Society.
1947: Austrian-American biochemist Gerty Cori became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which she received along with Carl Ferdinand Cori "for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen", and Bernardo Alberto Houssay "for his discovery of the part played by the hormone of the anterior pituitary lobe in the metabolism of sugar".
1947: American biochemist Marie Maynard Daly became the first African-American woman to complete a PhD in chemistry in the United States. She completed her dissertation, entitled "A Study of the Products Formed by the Action of Pancreatic Amylase on Corn Starch" at Columbia University.
1947: Berta Karlik, an Austrian physicist, was awarded the Haitinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for her discovery of astatine.
1947: Susan Ofori-Atta became the first Ghanaian woman to earn a medical degree when she graduated from the University of Edinburgh.
1948: Canadian plant pathologist and mycologist Margaret Newton became the first woman to be awarded the Flavelle Medal from the Royal Society of Canada, in recognition of her extensive research in wheat rust fungal disease. Her experiments led to the development of rust-resistant strains of wheat.
1948: American limnologist Ruth Patrick of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia led a multidisciplinary team of scientists on an extensive pollution survey of the Conestoga River watershed in Pennsylvania. Patrick would become a leading authority on the ecological effects of river pollution, receiving the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement in 1975.
1949: Botanist Valida Tutayug became the first Azerbaijani woman to receive a PhD in biological studies. She went on to write the first national Azerbaijani-language textbooks on botany and biology.
1949: Winifred Goldring (February 1, 1888 – January 30, 1971), was an American paleontologist and became the first female president of the Paleontological Society, her work included a description of stromatolites, as well as the study of Devonian crinoids. She was the first woman in the US to be appointed as a State Paleontologist.

== Late 20th century ==

=== 1950s ===