Women in STEM

The STEM industry has historically been very male-dominated, but there are women in this industry who have shaped it and changed it forever. These are a few of my favourite women who had huge impacts on the scientific world. This list is definitely not exhaustive, and has some well known names but also perhaps some less well known females. 

Marie Curie

She is perhaps the most famous woman in STEM as she was the first woman to receive the Nobel prize, the first person to receive two Nobel prizes, the only woman to have won the Nobel prize twice and remains the only person to have won the Nobel prize in two different fields (physics and chemistry). Her work was based around radioactivity and chemistry, and she discovered radioactivity and how to isolate radioactive isotopes. She also made a huge contribution to the war effort in WW1 as she used her research to develop portable X-Ray machines that were used by hospitals. In addition, she discovered two new elements; polonium (named after her native country Poland) and radium. She has had arguably one of the biggest impacts a singular person has had on science, and remains an inspiration to people everywhere. 

Florence Nightingale

The next name is also quite a well known name, especially in the UK. Dubbed ‘The Lady with The Lamp’, Florence Nightingale was a nurse during the Crimean war. She was a pioneer in sanitation for hospitals, and was credited for moving the death rate in her own hospital down from 42% to 2%. However, many people do not know that she is also a pivotal statistician and social reformer, and used her statistics knowledge to create the world’s first pie-chart. This was entitled ‘The Diagram of the Causes of Mortality for the Army in the east’. She used this simple way of displaying data to make statistics available to everyone, and showed this to civil servants and politicians in order to help them understand the amount of preventable deaths and aid reform in healthcare. She has had such a large impact on the UK but also globally that the new Covid-19 hospital in London is named ‘the Nightingale’ after her. 

Katherine Johnson

Katherine Johnson was one of NASAs ‘human computers’ who were especially well known for calculating complex mathematical sums largely by hand. She worked in NASA during the space race, and her orbital calculations were pivotal for getting crews into space. She worked on missions for the first American astronauts to ever reach space, and has been accredited and awarded many things including a Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama. She was one of the very few black female scientists to work in NASA at that time, and her career has been so inspiring that a film ‘Hidden Figures’ has been made about her and two other black female scientists, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jackson, and their journey in NASA.

Tu Youyou

Perhaps one of the less well known names on this list, Tu Youyou was credited with pioneering the malaria vaccine which saved millions of lives. She is a Chinese chemist and malariologist, and she discovered the chemicals artemisinin and dihydroartemisinin. She based her research on reading ancient Chinese texts from the Han Dynasty to see how they treated malaria symptoms, and eventually found a reference to the use of wormwood to treat intermittent fevers, a symptom of malaria. She then extracted these two chemicals which were the active ingredients in wormwood that combated malaria, and through her research, a vaccine was made.  She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2015 for Medicine and Physiology and continues to be an inspiration for young medics. 

As I mentioned above, this list is not complete and there are so many more interesting women who have had huge impacts on the STEM industry. I just hope this post inspires some people or has taught you something new!