Lise Meitner (Physics): A pioneering physicist, Meitner co-led the research team that discovered nuclear fission. However, the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded solely to her male collaborator, Otto Hahn. Meitner was nominated 19 times for the chemistry prize and 30 times for the physics prize, but never won.
Chien-Shiung Wu (Physics): Known as the "First Lady of Physics," Wu conducted the "Wu experiment," which disproved the law of conservation of parity. However, the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics went to her male colleagues, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, who provided the theoretical work, while Wu's experimental proof was ignored.
Rosalind Franklin (Chemistry/Medicine): Franklin's X-ray diffraction images of DNA, particularly "Photo 51," were critical to identifying the double-helix structure. Her work was used by James Watson and Francis Crick without her permission or knowledge to win the 1962 Nobel Prize. She was not included in the prize because she died in 1958, and the Nobel is not awarded posthumously.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Physics): As a graduate student in 1967, she discovered the first radio pulsars. The 1974 Nobel Prize for the discovery was awarded to her male supervisor, Antony Hewish, rather than her.
Vera Rubin (Physics): Her groundbreaking work in the 1970s provided the first strong evidence for the existence of dark matter. She was never recognized by the Nobel committee, despite widespread consensus that her work deserved the prize, and died in 2016.
Marietta Blau (Physics): She developed photographic emulsion techniques that made high-energy particle detection possible, transforming particle physics, but she was overlooked, and the prize went to others who built on her work.
Josephine Baker (1906–1975): While famous as a performer, she was also a member of the French Resistance during WWII, smuggling secrets to England using invisible ink on her sheet music, and was a prominent civil rights activist.
Annette Kellermann
The record-breaking Australian swimmer advocated for women to be able to wear a one-piece bathing suit instead of dresses with stockings — and she was arrested for it. She wore a bathing suit that left her arms bare and cut off at her mid-thigh in 1907, a look that got her arrested in Massachusetts for indecency. The popularity of her swimsuit at the time led her to launch her own swimwear line.
Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon. She hid in the bushes at the starting line, then jumped in the race wearing Bermuda shorts and a sweatshirt over a swimsuit to hide that she was a woman. It didn’t take long for the crowds to figure it out — and everyone cheered her on. She finished in 3 hours, 21 minutes and 40 seconds.