---
title: "List of inventions and discoveries by women"
chunk: 1/8
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventions_and_discoveries_by_women"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:51:34.164784+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

This page aims to list inventions and discoveries in which women played a major role.

== Medicine ==

=== Pharmaceuticals ===
Aciclovir
Gertrude B. Elion contributed to the development of aciclovir, an antiviral drug used for the treatment of herpes simplex virus infections, chickenpox, and shingles.
Artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin
Tu Youyou discovered artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin, both now standard treatments for malaria. Artemisinin is isolated from the plant Artemisia annua, sweet wormwood, a herb employed in Chinese traditional medicine.
Azathioprine
Azathioprine is an Immunosuppressive drug used in rheumatoid arthritis, granulomatosis with polyangiitis, Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis, and in kidney transplants to prevent rejection first synthesized by George H. Hitchings and Gertrude B. Elion in 1957 .
AZT
Flossie Wong-Staal was the first scientist to clone HIV and map its genes. Gertrude Elion made foundational contributions to the development of AZT, one of the first antiretroviral medications used in the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS.
Chemotherapy
Jane C. Wright was the first to identify methotrexate, one of the foundational chemotherapy drugs, as an effective tool against cancerous tumors.
feeding tube
Bessie Blount Griffin used plastic, boiling water to mold the material, a file, ice pick, hammer, and some dishes to create the first feeding tube, allowed patients to control how much they would eat without assistance from others.
Mercaptopurine
Mercaptopurine is a medication for cancer and autoimmune diseases including acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), chronic myeloid leukemia (CML), Crohn's disease, and ulcerative colitis. It was discovered by  Gertrude B. Elion and George H. Hitchings.
Pyrimethamine
Pyrimethamine, sold under the trade name Daraprim, is an anti-parasitic medication used to treat a variety of conditions including toxoplasmosis and isosporiasis. Pyrimethamine was initially developed by Nobel Prize winning scientist Gertrude Elion as a treatment for malaria.
Vitamin E
Katharine Bishop and Herbert McLean Evans co-discovered Vitamin E while studying the reproductive cycle of rats.

=== Pediatrics ===

Apgar score
Invented in 1952 by Virginia Apgar.
Disposable diapers
The first disposable diaper was invented in 1946 by Marion Donovan, a professional-turned-homemaker who wanted to ensure her children's cloth diapers remained dry while they slept. Donovan patented her design (called 'Boaters') in 1951. She also invented the first paper diapers, but executives did not invest in this idea and it was consequently scrapped for over ten years, until Procter & Gamble used Donovan's design ideas to create Pampers.
Another diaper design was created by Valerie Hunter Gordon (née de Ferranti), who patented it in 1948.
Child carriers
Snugli and Weego were invented by nurse and peacekeeper Ann Moore first in the 1960s.
Pertussis vaccine
A pioneering female American doctor, medical researcher and an outspoken voice in the pediatrics community, the supercentenarian Leila Alice Denmark (1898–2012) is credited as co-developer of the pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine.
Single hand medical syringe
Letitia Mumford Geer thought that the syringes being manufactured were difficult to use because they were often imprecise and unsanitary. This influenced her to create a more precise syringe. On February 12, 1896, Geer filed for a patent for the one-handed medical syringe design.
The entire discipline of Physical Therapy
Mary McMillan, working with Polio patients in the 1920s.

== Astronomy and astrophysics ==
Harvard Stellar Classification Scheme
The first classification of stars based on their temperature, created by Annie Jump Cannon, used in publications up to 1924.
Pulsars
Rapidly rotating neutron stars discovered by Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967.
The galaxy rotation problem
A major piece of evidence for the presence of dark matter in the Universe, discovered by Vera Rubin from observations of galactic rotation curves in the 1970s.
Stars luminosity
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer who discovered the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variable stars at the beginning of 20th century.
Merieme Chadid is a French and Moroccan astronomer and explorer who discovered hypersonic shock waves in variable stars as well as the first astronomer committed to install a large observatory at the heart of Antarctica towards an understanding of stellar evolution in the Universe by leading scientific polar explorations.
Radio astronomy
Ruby Violet Payne-Scott was an Australian pioneer in radiophysics and radio astronomy as well as the first female radio astronomer discovering Type I and Type III solar radio bursts.
Stars are  primarily composed of hydrogen and helium
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin found in her 1925 PhD thesis that stars are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium.  Thus, her thesis established that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe.
When Payne's dissertation was reviewed, astronomer Henry Norris Russell dissuaded her from concluding that the composition of the Sun was predominantly hydrogen and thus very different from that of the Earth, as it contradicted the accepted wisdom at the time. She consequently described the result in her thesis as "spurious". Russell realized she was correct four years later after having derived the same result by different means and publishing it in 1929. He acknowledged Payne's work and discovery admiringly in his paper but he is often credited for the conclusions they both reached.
The new outer arm of the Milky Way
In 2004, astrophysicist and radio astronomer Naomi McClure-Griffiths  identified a new spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy.

== Physics ==
Radiation
Marie Skłodowska-Curie (born Maria Salomea Skłodowska) was the first woman to receive a Nobel prize for her works on radiations and, up until today, the only woman to receive two Nobel prizes (among them, one Nobel prize in chemistry for discoveries on polonium and radium). She is the sole laureate to be recognized within two distinct scientific areas.
Fanny Gates further investigated the properties of radiation. Together with Ernest Rutherford, she amassed evidence that radioactivity was not the result of any simple chemical or physical processes. In particular, Gates showed that radioactivity could not be destroyed by heat or ionization due to chemical reactions, and that radioactive materials differ from phosphorescent materials both qualitatively and quantitatively.