The history of science is full of women who developed foundational ideas, tools, and technologies — only to have their contributions minimised, appropriated, or credited to male colleagues. It is time to read the original record.
The history of science has a consistency problem. When historians and science journalists examine primary records — original laboratory notebooks, grant applications, patent filings, conference presentations, and contemporaneous correspondence — they repeatedly find women whose contributions to foundational discoveries were minimised, appropriated, or attributed to male colleagues who subsequently received the credit, the prizes, and the institutional recognition.
This is not ancient history. It applies to discoveries made within living memory, technologies now embedded in daily life, and fields that would look fundamentally different if we acknowledged who actually did the work. What follows is not a celebration of victimhood — it is an exercise in accuracy, because understanding how knowledge is actually produced requires understanding who actually produced it.
In 1843, Ada Lovelace translated an Italian mathematician's notes on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine from French, adding her own notes that were three times the length of the original article. Those notes contained what is now recognised as the first published algorithm intended to be processed by a machine — specifically, a method for calculating Bernoulli numbers using Babbage's engine.
Lovelace's contribution went considerably further than translation. She was the first person to conceptualise that the Analytical Engine could process symbols beyond numbers, that it could theoretically be programmed to compose music or handle any content that could be expressed in symbols, and that the machine's capabilities were limited only by the instructions given to it — not by any intrinsic property of the machine itself. She also noted, presciently, what Babbage's engine could not do: it could only do what we know how to order it to do. This distinction between computation and intelligence would not be formally articulated again until Alan Turing in 1950.
Photograph 51 is one of the most important images in the history of science. Taken by Rosalind Franklin and her graduate student Raymond Gosling at King's College London in May 1952, it is an X-ray diffraction image of DNA in its B form that reveals, to anyone who can read such images, that DNA has a helical structure with two strands and a consistent 34-angstrom repeat.
Franklin was a world-class X-ray crystallographer whose technical skill produced images of a precision that her contemporaries could not match. Her interpretation of Photograph 51 and her broader X-ray analysis work were central to understanding DNA's structure. James Watson saw Photograph 51 without Franklin's knowledge or permission, shown to him by Maurice Wilkins. Watson and Crick's 1953 Nature paper acknowledging the double-helix structure cited her work only obliquely. The 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Watson, Crick, and Wilkins. Franklin had died of ovarian cancer in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Whether she would have shared the prize had she lived remains one of the most debated counterfactuals in science history.
"The pattern in these stories is not simply one of credit being stolen. It is one of women being systematically placed in environments where their contributions could be invisible — as assistants, as translators, as 'computers' — while the interpretive and theoretical work that drew on their data was attributed to the men in the room." — Prof. Lena Stromberg, historian of science, Uppsala University
During the Second World War, film actress Hedy Lamarr — born Hedwig Kiesler in Vienna — co-invented with composer George Antheil a radio guidance system for torpedoes that used frequency hopping to prevent enemy jamming. Their patent, granted in 1942, described a method of rapidly switching transmission frequencies in a pattern known only to the transmitter and receiver, making the signal impossible to intercept or jam.
The US Navy declined to use the technology during the war and the patent expired in 1959 before the military found it useful. When frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology was finally adopted and became the foundational principle behind Bluetooth, GPS, and wi-fi, the patent had long expired. Lamarr received no financial compensation. She received the Electronic Frontier Foundation Pioneer Award in 1997, at the age of 82, the first public recognition of her technological contribution. She died three years later. Frequency hopping now underlies the wireless communication architecture of the entire modern economy.
In 1956, theoretical physicists Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang proposed that parity — the assumption that physical laws are symmetric under mirror reflection — might not be conserved in weak nuclear interactions. This was a radical claim. The principle of parity conservation was considered inviolable. They suggested that an experiment could settle the question, and they proposed what that experiment should look like.
Chien-Shiung Wu, an experimental physicist at Columbia University already regarded as one of the finest in the world, designed and executed the experiment. Working at the National Bureau of Standards in Washington over the winter of 1956-57, she and her team cooled cobalt-60 atoms to near absolute zero and measured the direction of electron emission during nuclear decay. The result was definitive: parity was violated. The mirror universe behaves differently from our own.
Lee and Yang received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1957 — remarkably quickly, just a year after the theoretical proposal. Wu received nothing. She received many other honours over her career, including the Wolf Prize and the first honorary doctorate awarded to a woman by Princeton University, but never the Nobel. She died in 1997. The Nobel Committee has never publicly explained the omission.
It is worth noting that not every story of women in science ends in erasure. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system — a technology that allows targeted editing of DNA sequences with a precision that is transforming medicine, agriculture, and fundamental biology research.
Their credit was not uncontested. A parallel team at the Broad Institute led by Feng Zhang also made key contributions, particularly in demonstrating CRISPR's function in eukaryotic (complex) cells, and a lengthy patent dispute followed. But the Nobel Committee's decision was widely praised for recognising the foundational conceptual and biochemical work that Doudna and Charpentier produced. The story of CRISPR is, among other things, evidence that the structural conditions that erased the contributions of earlier generations can sometimes be changed.
Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson — the "hidden figures" of NASA's early space programme — worked as human computers at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and later NASA during the late 1950s and 1960s. Their mathematical calculations were foundational to the Mercury and Apollo programmes.
Katherine Johnson's orbital mechanics calculations were so trusted that John Glenn refused to launch unless she personally verified the computer's numbers — which she did, confirming them by hand. Her work on trajectory analysis for the 1969 Apollo 11 mission contributed to the Moon landing. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, at the age of 96. Dorothy Vaughan became the first Black supervisor at NACA and taught herself and her team FORTRAN when digital computers arrived, ensuring they remained indispensable. Mary Jackson became NASA's first Black female engineer, later pivoting to focus on improving opportunities for women and minorities at the agency.
Their stories were largely unknown to the public until the 2016 film and book "Hidden Figures" — more than fifty years after the events described.
The history of women's contributions to science and technology is not a simple story of men stealing credit. The institutional structures of science — who could enrol in universities, who could publish under their own name, who could be a principal investigator, who could hold patents, who could be considered for prizes — systematically disadvantaged women for most of recorded history, and in many contexts continue to do so.
The Nobel Prize's gender disparity is perhaps the most cited example. As of 2024, approximately 60 women have won Nobel Prizes in the sciences, compared to over 600 men. The disparity is not fully explained by historical exclusion from science — it also reflects the lag between significant work and prize recognition (Nobel Prizes are almost never awarded quickly) and ongoing disparities in publication rates, citation rates, and institutional appointment rates.
But the stories above are not primarily about institutional disadvantage in the abstract. They are about specific instances where the historical record, examined carefully, shows women doing the work that changed the field — and the field's official history looking the other way. Correcting that history is not a political project. It is just accuracy.