---
title: "Timeline of women in science"
chunk: 9/16
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"
---

1920: Louisa Bolus was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of South Africa for her contributions to botany. Over the course of her lifetime, Bolus identified and named more than 1,700 new South African plant species - more species than any other botanist in South Africa.
1921: Edelmira Inés Mórtola (1894–1973), the first woman to become a geologist in Argentina was awarded her PhD at the University of Buenos Aires, the first woman to received her doctorate there. The university named the Mórtola Mineralogy Museum in her honor.
1923: María Teresa Ferrari, an Argentine physician, earned the first diploma awarded to a woman by the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris for her studies of the urinary tract.
1924: Florence Bascom became the first woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America.
1925: Mexican-American botanist Ynes Mexia embarked on her first botanical expedition into Mexico, collecting over 1500 plant specimens. Over the course of the next thirteen years, Mexia collected more than 145,000 specimens from Mexico, Alaska, and multiple South American countries. She discovered 500 new species.
1925: American medical scientist Florence Sabin became the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
1925: British-American astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin established that hydrogen is the most common element in stars, and thus the most abundant element in the universe.
1926: American scientist Katharine Burr Blodgett became the first woman to earn a PhD in physics at the University of Cambridge, under the supervision of Sir Ernest Rutherford.
1927: Kono Yasui became the first Japanese woman to earn a doctorate in science, studying at the Tokyo Imperial University and completing her thesis on "Studies on the structure of lignite, brown coal, and bituminous coal in Japan".
1927: Bohumila Bednářová, the first Czech woman to become professionally involved in astronomy, co-founds the Prague Observatory
1928: Alice Evans became the first woman elected president of the Society of American Bacteriologists.
1928: Helen Battle became the first woman to earn a PhD in marine biology in Canada.
1928: British biologist Kathleen Carpenter published the first English-language textbook devoted to freshwater ecology: Life in Inland Waters.
1929: American botanist Margaret Clay Ferguson became the first female president of the Botanical Society of America.
1929: Scottish-Nigerian Agnes Yewande Savage became the first West African woman to graduate from medical school, obtaining her degree at the University of Edinburgh.

=== 1930s ===

1930: Concepción Mendizábal Mendoza became the first woman in Mexico to earn a civil engineering degree.
1932: Michiyo Tsujimura became the first Japanese woman to earn a doctorate in agriculture. She studied at the Tokyo Imperial University, and her doctoral thesis was entitled "On the Chemical Components of Green Tea".
1933: Hungarian scientist Elizabeth Rona received the Haitinger Prize from the Austrian Academy of Sciences for her method of extracting polonium.
1933: American bacteriologist Ruth Ella Moore became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in the natural sciences, completing her doctorate in bacteriology at Ohio State University.
1933: Egyptian medical doctor Tawhida Abdel-Rahman becomes the first female doctor employed by the Egyptian Government Health Ministry.
1935: French chemist Irène Joliot-Curie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry along with Frédéric Joliot-Curie "for their synthesis of new radioactive elements".
1935: American plant hybridist Grace Sturtevant, the "First Lady of Iris", received the American Iris Society's gold medal for her lifetime's work.
1936: Edith Patch became the first female president of the Entomological Society of America.
1936: Mycologist Kathleen Maisey Curtis was elected the first female Fellow at the Royal Society of New Zealand.
1936: Danish seismologist and geophysicist Inge Lehmann discovered that the Earth has a solid inner core distinct from its molten outer core.
1937: Canadian forensic pathologist Frances Gertrude McGill assisted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in establishing their first forensic detection laboratory.
1937: Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain became the first female Haitian anthropologist and the first Haitian person to complete a PhD, receiving her doctoral degree from the University of Paris.
1937: Marietta Blau and her student Hertha Wambacher, both Austrian physicists, received the Lieben Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for their work on cosmic ray observations using the technique of nuclear emulsions.
1938: Elizabeth Abimbola Awoliyi became the first woman to be licensed to practise medicine in Nigeria after graduating from Trinity College Dublin and the first West African female medical officer with a license of the Royal Surgeon (Dublin).
1938: Geologist Alice Wilson became the first woman appointed as Fellow to the Royal Society of Canada.
1938: South African naturalist Marjorie Courtenay-Latimer discovered a living coelacanth fish caught near the Chalumna river. The species had been believed to be extinct for over 60 million years. It was named latimeria chalumnae in her honour.
1938: Botanists Elzada U Clover and Lois Jotter were the first women to catalog plant life in the Grand Canyon and the first to raft the entire length of the Colorado River
1939: Austrian-Swedish physicist Lise Meitner, along with Otto Hahn, led the small group of scientists who first discovered nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron; the results were published in early 1939.
1939: French physicist Marguerite Perey discovered francium.
1939: Kamala Sohonie was an Indian biochemist who in 1939 became the first Indian woman to receive a PhD in a scientific discipline.

=== 1940s ===