Here we highlight some of the powerful female role models in STEM to inspire!
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Bessie Blount Griffin was born in the community of Hickory, in Princess Anne County (later the city of Chesapeake), where she attended a one-room segregated school. After being punished for writing with her left hand, she taught herself to write by holding a pencil in her teeth and feet, techniques she later taught to servicemen who had suffered amputations. Her father died as a result of injuries suffered during World War I and she moved with her mother to New Jersey during the 1920s. She studied at Union County Junior College and later at the Panzer College of Physical Education and Hygiene and became a registered physical therapist.
Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace was an English mathematician and writer known for her work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a proposed general purpose computing machine. She was the first to understand the full potential of Babbage’s design – the inventor had originally conceived the Analytical Engine as an instrument for performing calculations, but Lovelace realized that it could also be used to manipulate symbols and compose music. In the 1840s, Lovelace wrote an algorithm for the Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers, which became the world’s first published computer algorithm. For this reason, she is considered by many to be the first ever computer programmer. Ada Lovelace Day, a global celebration of the achievements of women in STEM fields, takes place every year on the second Tuesday of October.
This American biochemist also suffered from a serious illness as a child. She contracted polio and, as a result, had a limp her entire life. Yet, academically, she excelled. Florence earned a doctorate’s degree from Yale University and taught at several colleges. However, her greatest contribution was in tuberculosis research. She was able to purify a protein from tuberculosis bacteria. This then became an international standard. Florence also made intravenous injections much safer than before. She did that by inventing a method of creating distilled water that was free of contaminants.
Mary Jackson was an American mathematician and aerospace engineer at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which in 1958 was succeeded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). She worked at Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, for most of her career. She started as a computer at the segregated West Area Computing division in 1951. She took advanced engineering classes and, in 1958, became NASA's first black female engineer.
Marie Curie may be one of the most well-known women in STEM history. The Polish Native was a chemist and physicist. Throughout her career in STEM, Marie developed the theory of radioactivity, methods of isolating radioactive isotopes, and discovered radium and polonium. During World War I, she invented portable X-ray machines that field hospitals could use. As a result, Marie became the first woman in history to win the Nobel Prize as well as the first person to ever win it twice. She is also the only woman to have ever won two Nobel Prizes.
Nettie held a doctor’ degree in biology and worked on investigations in cytology. Her most notable contribution to STEM was the discovery or X and Y chromosomes. This led to a string of new discoveries such as the correspondence of heritable characteristics to chromosomes. Stevens was one of the first American women to be recognized for her contribution to science. Her research was completed at Bryn Mawr College.
Susan Maria McKinney Steward (March 1847 – March 17, 1918) was an American physician and author. She was the third African-American woman to earn a medical degree, and the first in New York state. McKinney-Steward's medical career focused on prenatal care and childhood disease. From 1870 to 1895, she ran her own practice in Brooklyn and co-founded the Brooklyn Women's Homeopathic Hospital and Dispensary. She sat on the board and practiced medicine at the Brooklyn Home for Aged Colored People. From 1906, she worked as college physician at the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Wilberforce University in Ohio. In 1911, she attended the Universal Race Congress in New York, where she delivered a paper entitled "Colored American Women".
Florence Nightingale gained fame as “the Lady with the Lamp” for her heroic nursing in the Crimean War. There, she was credited for reducing the death rate from 42% to 2%. She was a visionary designer of hospital systems and pioneered the improvement of sanitation in working-class homes. She is known as the inventor of modern nursing. Her students and trainees became matrons at many hospitals and opened nursing schools of their own. She had a genius for presenting statistical data in graphic form. She developed a proportional pie chart still used today – Diagram of the Causes of Mortality. She used these skills to champion better health care at home and abroad.
While the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the structure of DNA went to three male scientists, it wouldn’t have happened without the help of Rosalind Franklin, an English chemist. Rosalind had always wanted to be a scientist, yet her father strongly discouraged her from doing so because of how hard it was to be a female scientist at the time. Throughout her work, she managed to get Photo 51, a high-resolution X-ray image of crystallized DNA fibers. It was something that another group of scientists had hypothesized yet had no confirmation for. Rosalind endured much gender harassment throughout her career and did not receive the appreciation for her work that she deserved.
Working alongside her brother, she made several impactful contributions to astronomy such as discovering multiple comets. Later in her life, she received several gold medals from England, Ireland, and Prussia. Caroline became the first female scientist to ever receive a salary, as well as the first woman in a government position in England’s history.
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