There’s an old saying that goes, “The rooster crows, but the hen delivers,” and it’s an apt metaphor for the world of invention.
Most of us have little difficulty listing male inventors, but rattling off a list of female innovators is harder. It’s not because women don’t innovate, but because historically they haven’t had the educational opportunities that male innovators have had. There has also been cultural reporting bias in favor of male inventors, despite the countless female innovators involved in some of the biggest technological advances in history.
Fortunately, the internet (partly made possible by Radia Perlman’s Spanning Tree Protocol technology) means that female innovators don’t have to continue foregoing the recognition they deserve. Here are five of the top female innovators of all time.
Patricia Bath
Patricia Bath was the first African American female doctor awarded a patent for medical purposes, and that patent means that people with cataracts can have their sight restored. Bath invented the Laserphaco Probe in 1981 — a device that uses a laser to painlessly dissolve cataracts in the eye, then cleans the eye to facilitate insertion of a replacement lens. The device is now used internationally to prevent blindness due to cataracts, which affect around 25 million people in the U.S. alone.
Marie Curie
Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1867, Marie Sklodowska Curie obtained her degrees in physics and mathematics from the Sorbonne in Paris. Earning her doctorate in 1903, Curie took her late husband Pierre’s place as Professor of General Physics in 1906 — a first for a woman at the Sorbonne. The discovery of radioactivity in 1896 led to Marie Curie’s isolation of radium. During World War I, Curie brought portable x-ray machines to the battlefield, heralding the x-ray as one of modern medicine’s greatest advances.
Temple Grandin
A professor of animal science at Colorado State University, Temple Grandin is one of the world’s foremost experts on both livestock welfare and autism, a condition she has. Feedlot science may not be glamorous, but Grandin’s innovations for calming animals in feedlots are used by beef plants across the U.S. She has published scientific papers on preslaughter stress and meat quality and is widely believed to have done more for livestock welfare than any other individual. She is also an internationally famous spokesperson for autism spectrum disorder.
Katherine Johnson
Katherine Goble Johnson, who is now 100 years old, graduated from West Virginia State University at the age of 18, with dual degrees in math education and French. After raising her children, Johnson went to work for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (today’s NASA) in 1953, working on America’s space program from its beginning. Among her accomplishments as a “human computer” were calculations of trajectories for the Lunar Orbiter Program, mapping the moon’s surface before the 1969 moon landing. Johnson stayed with NASA until 1986 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.
Stephanie Kwolek
Born in 1923 in Pennsylvania, chemist Stephanie Kwolek began her career with DuPont. Her specialty was fibers capable of performing in extreme conditions, and at one point she discovered a type of polymer that did just that. She supervised spinning this product into fibers with unprecedented strength and stiffness, and one of these innovative fibers became Kevlar. Kevlar has saved countless lives by providing lightweight body armor for police and military, and it’s also used to protect undersea optical fiber and suspend bridges. The modern world without Kevlar would certainly be a different place.
Female innovators are nothing new, but perhaps they will get more credit for their work as communication technology and cultural norms change.
How innovation is accomplished is changing too, and IdeaScale invites you to download our white paper on crowdsourcing and technology to learn how crowdsourcing improves speed-to-market while reducing R&D costs.
This article was originally published on the IdeaScale blog here.
