Top 10 Women Innovators
Woman and innovation may have been considered oxymoronic by most people up until the late twentieth century. The majority of the most famous inventors and discoverers turn out to be men – in large part because women have often been denied the education and opportunity required to make similar achievements.
Thanks to slow but appreciable progress in the last several decades, women have become empowered to take on more roles as equal partners with men in science, innovation and the public sector. Despite these gains, most countries still tend to be paternalistic, which creates a glass-ceiling effect for many women.
This group of game-changing Women Innovators is not only about women who created or improved something significantly with technological or business value. This list also includes women who innovated in the realm of politics and culture, which may be understood as creating foundational changes for further progress by women in a wide array of domains.
This list of Top 10 Women Innovators recognizes different women innovators from the early nineteenth century to the present. These women could be categorized into three groups: 1) The breakers of stigmatized rules and traditions (Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace); 2) The stars in so-called masculine fields (Indira Gandhi, Katherine Johnson); and, 3) The champions in today’s innovation environment (Michela Magas, Angélica Fuentes and Audrey Cheng).
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Ada Lovelace
Ada Lovelace was the first computer programmer in history. Thanks to her brilliance in mathematics, she wrote the world’s first machine algorithm for an early computing machine that existed only on paper — in the 1840s! At that time many first achieved by women were claimed by the men they worked with; therefore, there is a chance that more of her outstanding work is not attributed to her, but to Professor Charles Babbage with whom she worked in the 1830s and ‘40s.
