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Women in STEM history map

Explore the contributions of historical women to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) across the UK. 

Do you have a favourite landmark, monument or location connected to a famous female scientist in history who has inspired you? Submit your suggestion and help us map science history.

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Central London walking tour

Find out more about some of the pioneering women who have made scientific history, all connected to locations just a few minutes from the Royal Society’s home at Carlton House Terrace. If you find yourself visiting us, why not try walking between them in a short tour?

Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), the ‘lady with the lamp’, is known as a pioneer of both modern nursing and data visualisation. She used statistics to great effect during the Crimean War of 1853-56, employing her famous ‘coxcomb’ diagrams (somewhat like a pie chart) to communicate the impacts of poor hygiene in British army hospitals. This statue was designed by sculptor Arthur George Walker and unveiled in 1915, becoming only the second statue to honour a non-royal woman in London.   

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin FRS (1910-1994) was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer who helped lay the foundations for structural biology as a field. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1947, just two years after women were first elected to the Fellowship. In 1964 she received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for mapping the structure of vitamin B12, becoming the only British woman scientist to have been awarded a Nobel Prize for science. In Room 28, Floor 2 of the National Portrait Gallery is a portrait of Hodgkin by artist Maggi Hambling, commissioned by the Gallery in 1985. It shows her hard at work, depicted with a second pair of hands that create a great sense of activity, and referring to the rheumatoid arthritis that she suffered with throughout her life.   

The site of various aristocratic homes since the 1660s, Burlington House was purchased by British government in 1854, and from 1857 to 1968 housed the Royal Society. Today it continues to house the Geological Society, the Linnean Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, the Society of Antiquaries and the Royal Society of Chemistry, as well as the Royal Academy of Arts.  

The east wing of Burlington House, now home to the Royal Society of Chemistry, is where the first two women Fellows of the Royal Society, X-ray crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale FRS and microbiologist Marjory Stephenson FRS, would have signed our Charter Book as they were elected to the Fellowship in 1945.  

Kathleen Lonsdale FRS (1903-1971) began her scientific career in crystallography at the Royal Institution, around the corner on Albermarle Street, and went on to become the first female professor at University College London, the first woman named President of the International Union of Crystallography, and the first woman to hold the post of President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. 

Marjory Stephenson FRS (1885-1948) was a pioneer of chemical microbiology and wrote Bacterial Metabolism in 1930, which became a standard textbook for generations of microbiologists. She later co-founded the Society for General Microbiology and was elected as its second President in 1947. 

Just over a century earlier than the election of Lonsdale and Stephenson to the Fellowship of the Royal Society, in 1835 the Royal Astronomical Society, now housed in the west wing of Burlington House, elected Mary Somerville and Caroline Herschel as its first female Honorary Members. 

Mary Somerville (1750-1848) was a polymath, known for her successful series of science books on physics, astronomy, geography and microscopy, and was the first woman to have a paper relaying a scientific experiment read at a Royal Society meeting, in 1826, on “The Magnetic Properties of the Violet Rays of the Solar Spectrum”. The paper was read by her husband because, as a woman, she was not permitted to attend in person. She was also tutor to Ada Lovelace.  

Caroline Herschel (1780-1872) was an astronomer, known for her work with her brother William. Over her astronomical career she discovered several comets, fourteen nebulae, and improved astronomical cataloguing, revising and correcting John Flamsteed’s star catalogue from a century earlier. Her later cataloguing work would become the New General Catalogue (NGC), with many astronomical objects still referred to by their NGC number, and she was the first woman to be awarded a Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1828.  

Mary Beale (1633-1699) was a portrait artist, and the first documented woman in British art history to run her own artist’s studio. She painted many London scholars of the time, including Fellows of the Royal Society John Wilkins, John Tillotson and William Croone (whom our Croonian Medal is named for), the ‘English Hippocrates’ Thomas Sydenham, and Isaac Newton’s tutor, mathematician Isaac Barrow. She had strong connections to the church, and many of the people she painted were clergymen, including Wilkins and Tillotson. She is buried in St James’s Church, though her tomb was destroyed by a bomb in the Second World War and she is now commemorated by a plaque inside.  

Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh (1615-1691) was born Katherine Boyle in Ireland, her siblings including chemist and founding Royal Society Fellow Robert Boyle. From the 1640s onwards, Jones was deeply involved in the intellectual life of London, including with the Hartlib circle who would be influential in the founding of the Royal Society. She would host salons at her house at 83 Pall Mall to discuss the latest scientific and philosophical ideas. She was also known to practice chemistry herself, developing her own medicinal recipes and even commissioning Robert Hooke in 1676 to modify the house to include a laboratory for her brother.  

Ada Lovelace (1815-1852) was a mathematician, and is considered a pioneer of computing. Her tutor, Mary Somerville, introduced her to mathematician Charles Babbage FRS, and they started a long working relationship. Together they worked on Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a proposed mechanical computer for which she wrote a method to calculate a mathematical sequence called the Bernoulli numbers. This has been called the first computer programme, though as the Engine was never finished it was never tested. She was also the first to see the potential for mechanical computing beyond mathematics and for things like music.  

Gladys West was an American mathematician whose work building mathematical models of the Earth both contributed to our understanding of the shape of our planet, especially average sea levels, and laid the foundations for Global Positioning System (GPS) technology. In 2021, she was awarded the Royal Academy of Engineering’s Prince Philip Award, the first woman to win this award. West sadly passed away in January 2026.