Women in physics

Women in physics
This article discusses women who have made an important contribution to the field of physics.
International physics awards
Nobel laureates
Five women have won the Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded annually since 1901 by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. These are:
1903 Marie Curie: "in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel"
1963 Maria Goeppert Mayer: "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure"
2018 Donna Strickland: "for their method high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses"
2020 Andrea Ghez: "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy."
2023 Anne L'Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter."
Marie Curie was the first woman to receive the prize in 1903 and shared 1/2 of the prize with her husband Pierre Curie for their joint work on radioactivity, discovered by Henri Becquerel who got the other half of the prize. Marie Curie was the first woman to also receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911, making her the first person to win two Nobel prizes and, as of 2023, the first to be awarded two Nobel prizes in two different scientific categories.
Maria Goeppert Mayer became the second woman to win the prize in 1963, for the theoretical development of the nuclear shell model, a half of the prize shared with J. Hans D. Jensen (the other half given to Eugene Wigner). Donna Strickland shared half of the prize in 2018 with Gérard Mourou, for their work in chirped pulse amplification beginning in the 1980s (the other half given to Arthur Ashkin). Andrea Ghez was the fourth female Nobel laureate in 2020, she shared one half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel for the discovery of the supermassive compact object Sagittarius A* at the center of our galaxy (the other half given to Roger Penrose). In 2023, Anne L'Huillier shared the prize in equal parts with Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz for their experimental contribution and development of attosecond physics. L'Huillier is the first female laureate to receive 1/3 of monetary award of the Nobel Prize in Physics (Curie, Goeppert–Mayer, Strickland and Ghez received 1/4).
Physicists and physicochemists that won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry include Marie Curie, Irène Joliot-Curie, daughter of Marie Curie, in 1935, and Dorothy Hodgkin in 1964. Nuclear physicist Rosalyn Sussman Yalow was the second female scientist to win the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1977 for the development of radioimmunoassays. Human right activist and 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, Narges Mohammadi, was trained in nuclear physics.
Nobel nominees and nominators
According to the Nobel archives (updated up to 1970), other physicists that were nominated to the Nobel Prize in Physics but did not receive it, include:
Lise Meitner, nominated 19 times;
Chien-Shiung Wu, nominated 5 times;
Marietta Blau, nominated 3 times;
and Hertha Wambacher, Margaret Burbidge and Janine Connes, nominated once.
As of 2023, Connes was still alive and eligible to the prize. Irène Joliot-Curie and Dorothy Hodgkin were also nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physics, but received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935 and 1964, respectively. Lise Meitner is the female physicist the most nominated, 16 times for Physics and 14 times for Chemistry. About 1.7% of the Nobel nominations in Physics up to 1970 were women.
Aside from the named above, other physicists and physicochemists that were nominated to the Nobel Prize in Chemistry but dit not receive it, include Ida Noddack, Marguerite Perey, Alberte Pullman, and Erika Cremer.
Up to 1970, eight female scientists have participated as nominators for the Nobel Prize in Physics. These are Marie Curie, Hertha Sponer, Marie-Antoinette Tonnelat, Anne Barbara Underhill, Katharina Boll-Dornberger, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Dorothy Hodgkin, and Margaret Burbidge.
Clarivate Citation
Several women have been selected as Clarivate Citation laureates in Physics, which makes an annual list of possible candidates for the Nobel Prize in Physics based on citation statistics, these include:
2008 Vera Rubin "for her pioneering research indicating the existence of dark matter in the universe."
2012 Lene Hau "for the experimental demonstration of electromagnetically induced transparency 'slow light' (with Stephen E. Harris)."
2015 Deborah S. Jin "for pioneering research on atomic gases at ultra-cold temperatures and the creation of the first fermionic condensate."
2018 Sandra Faber "for pioneering methods to determine the age, size and distance of galaxies and for other contributions to cosmology."
2023 Sharon Glotzer "for demonstrating the role of entropy in the self-assembly of matter and for introducing strategies to control the assembly process to engineer new materials."
: deceased, no longer eligible.
Wolf Prize
Two women have been awarded the Wolf Prize in Physics, awarded by the Wolf Foundation in Israel since 1978. They are:
1978 Chien-Shiung Wu, "for her explorations of the weak interaction, helping establish the precise form and the non-conservation of parity for this natural force."
2022 Anne L'Huillier, "for pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics".
Breakthrough Prize
Women who have been awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics since 2012, include:
2018 WMAP Probe team, 27 listed members, including Hiranya Peiris, Licia Verde, Janet L. Weiland and Joanna Dunkley for "For detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies."
2018 Special recognition to Jocelyn Bell Burnell for "For fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars, and a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community."
Prizes only for female physicists
L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards, awaded bi-annually to one laureate per continent for outstanding contributions to the physical sciences.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer Award of the American Physical Society awarded annually in recognition of an outstanding contribution to physics research.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell Medal and Prize by the Institute of Physics in UK, for contributions to physics by a very early career physicist.
Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy awarded annually for outstanding contributions to astronomy within five years of earning a doctorate degree.
Timeline
Antiquity
: Aglaonice became the first female astronomer to be recorded in Ancient Greece.
c. 355–415 CE: Greek astronomer, mathematician and philosopher, Hypatia became renowned as a respected academic teacher, editor of Ptolemy's Almagest astronomical data, and head of her own science academy.
16th century
1572: astronomer Sophia Brahe assist her older brother Tycho Brahe finding a new bright object in the night sky, now known as called SN 1572 (a supernova). Sophia would help her brother in astronomy all his life.
17th century
1668: After separating from her husband, French polymath Marguerite de la Sablière established a popular salon in Paris. Scientists and scholars from different countries visited the salon regularly to discuss ideas and share knowledge, and Sablière studied physics, astronomy and natural history with her guests.
1680: French astronomer Jeanne Dumée published a summary of arguments supporting the Copernican theory of heliocentrism. She wrote "between the brain of a woman and that of a man there is no difference".
1693–1698: German astronomer and illustrator Maria Clara Eimmart created more than 350 detailed drawings of the moon phases.
18th century
1732: At the age of 20, Italian physicist Laura Bassi became the first female member of the Bologna Academy of Sciences. One month later, she publicly defended her academic theses and received a PhD. Bassi was awarded an honorary position as professor of physics at the University of Bologna. She was the first female physics professor in the world.
1738: French polymath Émilie du Châtelet became the first woman to have a paper published by the Paris Academy, following a contest on the nature of fire.
1740: Du Châtelet publishes Institutions de Physique, or Foundations of Physics, providing a metaphysical basis for Newtonian physics.
1751: 19-year-old Italian physicist Cristina Roccati received her PhD from the University of Bologna.
1755: Sculptor Jean-Jacques Caffieri makes a medallion of physicist Maria Angela Ardinghelli to be hung in French Academy of Sciences. The Academy did not accept female members at the time. Ardinghelli worked as the main correspondent and translator between Paris and Naples in terms of physics discussions.
1776: At the University of Bologna, Italian physicist Laura Bassi became the first woman appointed as chair of physics at a university.
19th century
1816: French mathematician and physicist Sophie Germain became the first women to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her work on elasticity theory.
1828: Caroline Herschel, sister of William Herschel, becomes the first woman to publish in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and is awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.
1835: Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville became the first female Honorary Members of the Royal Astronomical Society.
1856: Amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote provides the first demonstration of the warming effect of the sun is greater for air with water vapour than for dry air, and the effect is even greater with carbon dioxide (greenhouse effect).
1891: Agnes Pockels, gets help from Rayleigh to publish her first paper on nature of surface tension. There she first introduces the concept of the Pockels point and pioneers the field of surface science.
1895: Margaret Eliza Maltby becomes the first woman to earn a doctorate in the University of Göttingen.
1896: Elizabeth Stephansen becomes the first woman to complete the physics program of Zurich Polytechnic.
1897: American physicist Isabelle Stone became the first woman to receive a PhD in physics in the United States. She wrote her dissertation "On the Electrical Resistance of Thin Films" at the University of Chicago.
1898: Danish physicist Kirstine Meyer was awarded the gold medal of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters.
1899: Irish physicist Edith Anne Stoney was appointed a physics lecturer at the London School of Medicine for Women, becoming the first woman medical physicist. She later became a pioneering figure in the use of x-ray machines on the front lines of World War I.
1899: American physicists Marcia Keith and Isabelle Stone became charter members of the American Physical Society.
20th century
1900s
1903: Marie Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize; she received the Nobel Prize in Physics along with her husband, Pierre Curie "for their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel", and Henri Becquerel, "for his discovery of spontaneous radioactivity".
1900: Physicists Marie Curie and Isabelle Stone attended the first International Congress of Physics in Paris, France. They were the only two women out of 836 participants.
1906: English physicist, mathematician and engineer Hertha Ayrton became the first female recipient of the Hughes Medal from the Royal Society of London. She received the award for her experimental research on electric arcs and sand ripples. The first woman to be nominated for the Royal Society and to give a lecture to the Society.
1907: Ayrton joins the Suffragettes and the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).
1909: Danish physicist Kristine Meyer became the first Danish woman to receive a doctorate degree in natural sciences. She wrote her dissertation on the topic of "the development of the temperature concept" within the history of physics.
1910s
1911: Marie Curie became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, which she received "[for] the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, by the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this remarkable element". This made her the only woman to win two Nobel Prizes.
1912: Astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied the bright-dim cycle periods of Cepheid stars, then found a way to calculate the distance from such stars to Earth.
1918: Emmy Noether created Noether's theorem explaining the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.
1919: Hendrika Johanna van Leeuwen proves the Bohr–Van Leeuwen theorem in her thesis explaining why magnetism is an essentially quantum mechanical effect.
1920s
1922: the International Astronomical Union adopts the stellar classification used by Annie Jump Cannon. She came up with the first serious attempt to organize and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types.
1925: Annie Jump Cannon became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate of science from Oxford University.
1925: Astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin established that hydrogen is the most common element in stars, and thus the most abundant element in the universe.
1926: Katharine Burr Blodgett was the first women to earn a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Cambridge.
1926: The first application of quantum mechanics to molecular systems was done by Lucy Mensing. She studied the rotational spectrum of diatomic molecules using the methods of matrix mechanics.
1930s
1935: Katharine Burr Blodgett improves Irving Langmuir experimental set up leading to the development of the Langmuir–Blodgett trough and the discovery of the Langmuir–Blodgett films.
1936: Danish seismologist and geophysicist Inge Lehmann discovered that the Earth has a solid inner core distinct from its molten outer core.
1936: Hertha Sponer becomes the first female professor in the physics faculty in Duke University.
1937: Marietta Blau and her student Hertha Wambacher, both Austrian physicists, received the Lieben Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for their work on cosmic ray observations using the technique of nuclear emulsions.
1939
Lise Meitner helped lead a small group of scientists who first discovered the nuclear fission of uranium when it absorbed an extra neutron.
Nuclear physicist Marguerite Perey discovers francium.
Sameera Moussa became the first woman to earn a doctorate in atomic radiation and the first woman to hold a teaching post in Cairo University.
1940s
c. 1940: Elizabeth Alexander and Ruby Payne-Scott become the first women to work in radio astronomy. Making important results on the study of radar signals coming from the sun.
1941: Ruby Payne-Scott joined the Radio Physics Laboratory of the Australia Government's CSIRO; she was the first woman radio astronomer.
1942: Chicago Pile-1 led by Enrico Fermi, the first nuclear reactor reaches criticality. Leona Woods was the only woman in the team and she was instrumental in the construction and then utilization of geiger counters for analysis during experimentation.
1943: the Manhattan project hires the Calutron Girls, a large group of young girls to monitor dials and watch meters for calutrons, mass spectrometers adapted for separation of uranium isotopes, unaware of the purpose of the project.
1943: Berta Karlik discovers astatine as a product of two naturally occurring decay chains.
1944: Curium (atomic number 96, symbol Cm) gets discovered a gets named after Marie and Pierre Curie, the "m" in Cm as a reference to Marie.
1945: American physicists and mathematicians Frances Spence, Ruth Teitelbaum, Marlyn Meltzer, Betty Holberton, Jean Bartik and Kathleen Antonelli programmed the electronic general-purpose computer ENIAC, becoming some of the world's first computer programmers.
1947: Berta Karlik, an Austrian physicist, was awarded the Haitinger Prize of the Austrian Academy of Sciences for her discovery of Astatine
1947: Hilda Hänchen, in collaboration with Fritz Goos, demonstrates a new optical phenomena, now known as the Goos–Hänchen effect.
1949: Rosemary Brown (later Fowler), a student of C.F. Powell at the University of Bristol, discovers the k-meson in what Heisenberg calls "most beautiful" pictures of cosmic ray tracks from the Jungfraujoch (the 'k' track in Brown, R. et al. Nature, 163, 47 (1949). This discovery and the prior finding of a very similar particle in 1947 led to the "τ–θ puzzle", the discovery of parity violation in weak interactions, and hence the Standard Model.
1950s
1951: Cécile DeWitt-Morette founds the École de physique des Houches, one of the most prestigious scientific centers for international physics summer schools in Europe.
1952: Photograph 51, an X-ray diffraction image of crystallized DNA, was taken by Raymond Gosling in May 1952, working as a PhD student under the supervision of British chemist and biophysicist Rosalind Franklin; it was critical evidence in identifying the structure of DNA.
1954: Janine Connes pioneers the new field of Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy for astronomy.
1954: Sulamith Goldhaber, along with her husband Gerson Goldhaber, start a series of important experiments to measure the properties of the K meson.
1955: the results of the Fermi–Pasta–Ulam–Tsingou simulation is published in Los Alamos National Laboratory. It was coded by Mary Tsingou using the MANIAC I computer working with Enrico Fermi, John Pasta, and Stanislaw Ulam in the Manhattan Project. It represents one of the first computational experiments in mathematics and chaos theory.
1956: Chinese-American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu conducted a nuclear physics experiment in collaboration with the Low Temperature Group of the US National Bureau of Standards. The experiment, becoming known as the Wu experiment, showed that parity could be violated in weak interaction.
1957: Margaret Burbidge releases the landmark B2FH paper as first author along with Geoffrey Burbidge, William A. Fowler, and Fred Hoyle. The paper reviewed stellar nucleosynthesis theory and identified nucleosynthesis processes that are responsible for producing the elements heavier than iron and explained their relative abundances.
1958: Olga Ladyzhenskaya provides the first rigorous proofs of the convergence of a finite difference method for the Navier–Stokes equations.
1960: American medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones" along with Roger Guillemin and Andrew V. Schally who received it "for their discoveries concerning the peptide hormone production of the brain".
1960s
1962: French physicist Marguerite Perey became the first female Fellow elected to the Académie des Sciences.
1963: Maria Goeppert Mayer became the first American woman to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics; she shared the prize with J. Hans D. Jensen "for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure” and Eugene Paul Wigner "for his contributions to the theory of the atomic nucleus and the elementary particles, particularly through the discovery and application of fundamental symmetry principles".
1963: Experiments by Myriam Sarachik provided the first data that confirmed the Kondo effect.
1964: Chien-Shiung Wu spoke at MIT about gender discrimination.
1967: Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell co-discovered the first radio pulsars.
1970: Astronomer Vera Rubin published the first evidence for dark matter.
1970: , coins the term soft matter.
1970s
1971 Mina Rees became the first woman president of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) founded in 1848.
1972: Willie Hobbs Moore became the first African-American woman to receive a Ph.D. in physics.
1972: Sandra Faber became the first woman to join the Lick Observatory staff at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
1973: American physicist Anna Coble became the first African-American woman to receive a PhD in biophysics, completing her dissertation at University of Illinois.
1975: Mary K. Gaillard, working with Benjamin W. Lee and Jonathan L. Rosner, predicts the mass of the charm quark before it was measured. She will later also predict the mass of the bottom quark.
1975: María Teresa Ruiz, becomes the first woman to obtain a PhD in astrophysics at Princeton University.
1976: Sandra Faber publishes her Faber–Jackson relation, providing the first empirical power-law relation between the luminosity and the central stellar velocity dispersion of elliptical galaxy.
1977: Helen Quinn develops the Peccei–Quinn theory as one of the first possible solutions to the strong CP problem, in collaboration with Roberto Peccei.
1978: Chien-Shiung Wu becomes the inaugural laureate of the Wolf Prize in Physics for her help with the development of the Standard Model.
1980: Nigerian geophysicist Deborah Ajakaiye became the first woman in any West African country to be appointed a full professor of physics. Over the course of her scientific career, she became the first female Fellow elected to the Nigerian Academy of Science, and the first female dean of science in Nigeria.
1980: Mary K. Gaillard produces a report at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) addressing the fact that just 3% of the staff were women. She called for the elimination of gender discrimination through equality in promotion, maternity leave and full-day child care.
1980s
1981: Mary K. Gaillard becomes the first woman with a tenured position in the physics faculty at the University of California, Berkeley.
1985: Mildred Dresselhaus was appointed the first women Institute Professor at MIT
1986: Maria Goeppert Mayer Award was awarded for the first time to honor young female physicists at the beginning of their careers
1986 Jean M. Bennett became the first woman president of The Optical Society founded in 1916.
1990s
1992: Claudine Hermann first woman to be appointed professor at École Polytechnique.
1995: Reva Williams works out the Penrose process for rotating black holes.
1997: Chemical element with atomic number 278 is officially named meitnerium, after Lise Meitner.
1999: Lisa Randall published the Randall–Sundrum model, with Raman Sundrum.
2000: Mildred Dresselhaus became the director of the Office of Science at the United States Department of Energy.
2000: Helen Quinn becomes the first woman to receive the Dirac Medal of the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) "pioneering contributions to the quest for a unified theory of quarks and leptons and the strong, weak and electromagnetic interactions."
21st century
2000s
2001: Lene Hau stopped a beam of light completely
2003:
Geophysicist Claudia Alexander oversaw the final stages of Project Galileo, a space exploration mission that ended at the planet Jupiter.
Deborah S. Jin and her team were the first to condense pairs of fermionic atoms
Physicists Ayşe Erzan, Karimat El-Sayed, Li Fanghua, Mariana Weissmann and Anneke Levelt Sengers win the first L'Oréal-UNESCO For Women in Science Awards in Physical Sciences.
2005: Myriam Sarachik becomes the first woman to win the Oliver E. Buckley Condensed Matter Prize for her contributions to quantum spin dynamics and spin coherence in condensed matter systems, along with David Awschalom and Gabriel Aeppli.
2007: Physicist Ibtesam Badhrees was the first Saudi Arabian woman to become a member of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN).
2009: Margaret Reid becomes the first woman to win the Moyal Medal fromm Macquarie University, for her In 2019, her work on how to demonstrate the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox using squeezing and parametric down conversion.
2010s
2011: Taiwanese-American astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma led a team of scientists in discovering two of the largest black holes ever observed.
2012: Mildred Dresselhaus becomes the first female laureate of the Kavli Prize in Nanosciences "for her pioneering contributions to the study of phonons, electron-phonon interactions, and thermal transport in nanostructures".
2013: Nashwa Eassa founded the NGO Sudanese Women in Sciences.
2014: American theoretical physicist Shirley Anne Jackson was awarded the National Medal of Science. Jackson had been the first African-American woman to receive a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the early 1970s, and the first woman to chair the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
2014: Amanda Barnard becomes the first woman to win the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology for her computational simulations on diamond nanoparticles.
2016: Fabiola Gianotti became the first woman Director-General of CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research)
2018:
Astrophysicists Hiranya Peiris and Joanna Dunkley and Italian cosmologist Licia Verde were among 27 scientists awarded the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for their contributions to "detailed maps of the early universe that greatly improved our knowledge of the evolution of the cosmos and the fluctuations that seeded the formation of galaxies".
Astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell received the special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics for her scientific achievements and “inspiring leadership”, worth $3 million. She donated the entirety of the prize money towards the creation of scholarships to assist women, underrepresented minorities and refugees who are pursuing the study of physics.
Physicist Donna Strickland received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for groundbreaking inventions in the field of laser physics"; she shared it with Arthur Ashkin and Gérard Mourou.
For the first time in history, women received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Nobel Prize in Physics in the same year.
Human right activist and physicist Narges Mohammadi wins the Andrei Sakharov prize by the American Physical Society, "for her leadership in campaigning for peace, justice, and the abolition of the death penalty and for her unwavering efforts to promote the human rights and freedoms of the Iranian people, despite persecution that has forced her to suspend her scientific pursuits and endure lengthy incarceration."
Ewine van Dishoeck becomes the first female laureate of the Kavli Prize in Astrophysics for "for her combined contributions to observational, theoretical, and laboratory astrochemistry, elucidating the life cycle of interstellar clouds and the formation of stars and planets"
2019: Mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck became the first woman to win the Abel Prize for "her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory, and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics."
2020:
Andrea M. Ghez received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy." She shared half of the prize with Reinhard Genzel, while the other half was awarded to Roger Penrose.
Geoscientist Ingeborg Levin was the first woman to receive the Alfred Wegener medal from the European Geosciences Union "for fundamental contributions to our present knowledge and understanding of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, including the global carbon cycle."
Françoise Combes becomes the first female astrophysicist to win the CNRS Gold Medal, highest degree in research by the French government.
2020s
2022: Anne L’Huillier becomes the second female scientist to receive the Wolf Prize in Physics “for pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics”.
2022: Astronomer Ewine van Dishoeck is awarded the UNESCO Niels Bohr Medal.
2023: Professor Polina Bayvel becomes the first woman to win the Rumford Medal by the Royal Society.
2023: Anne l'Huillier receives the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics for "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter" shared with Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz.
See also
Timeline of women in science
Timeline of women in science in the United States
Women in NASA
Women in science
Women in the workforce
References
History of physics
Lists of women scientists
Physics