This is a timeline of women in science.

• 1848: Maria Mitchell became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she had discovered a new comet the year before.^[1]
• 1853: Jane Colden was the only female biologist mentioned by Carl Linnaeus in his masterwork Species Plantarum.^[2]
• 1889: Mary Emilie Holmes became the first female Fellow of the Geological Society of America.^[3]
• 1893: Florence Bascom became the second woman to earn her Ph.D in geology in the United States, and the first woman to receive a Ph.D from Johns Hopkins University.^[4][5] Geologists consider her to be the "first woman geologist in this country [America]."^[6]
• 1896: Florence Bascom became the first woman to work for the United States Geological Survey.^[7][8]
• 1901: Florence Bascom became the first female geologist to present a paper before the Geological Survey of Washington.^[9]
• 1903: Marie Curie became the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize when 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".^[10][11][12]
• 1912: 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.^[13]
• 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".^[14][13][15]
• 1924: Florence Bascom became the first woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America.^[9]
• 1925: Florence Sabin became the first woman elected to the National Academy of Science.^[16]
• 1928: Alice Evans became the first woman elected president of the Society of American Bacteriologists.^[17]
• 1935: Irène Joliot-Curie received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Frédéric Joliot-Curie "for their synthesis of new radioactive elements".^[18]
• 1936: Edith Patch became the first female president of the Entomological Society of America.^[19]
• 1947: Gerty Cori became the first woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which she received along with Carl Ferdinand Cori "for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen", and Bernardo Alberto Houssay "for his discovery of the part played by the hormone of the anterior pituitary lobe in the metabolism of sugar".^[20][21][22]
• 1950: Esther Lederberg was the first to isolate lambda bacteriophage, a DNA virus, from Escherichia coli K-12.^[23]
• 1952: Grace Hopper completed what is considered to be the first compiler, a program that allows a computer user to use English-like words instead of numbers. It was known as the A-0 compiler.^[24]
• 1960: 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".^[25]
• 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".^[26][27][28]
• 1964: Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances".^[29]
• 1965: Sister Mary Kenneth Keller became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in Computer Science.^[30] Her thesis was titled "Inductive Inference on Computer Generated Patterns."^[31]
• 1975: Chien-Shiung Wu became the first female president of the American Physical Society.^[32]
• 1976: Margaret Burbidge was named as the first female president of the American Astronomical Society.^[33][34]
• 1978: Anna Jane Harrison became the first female president of the American Chemical Society.^[35]
• 1983: Barbara McClintock received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of genetic transposition; she was the first woman to receive that prize without sharing it, and the first American woman to receive any unshared Nobel Prize.^{[36][37][38][39][40]}
• 1986: Rita Levi-Montalcini received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Stanley Cohen, "for their discoveries of growth factors".^[41]
• 1988: Gertrude B. Elion received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with James W. Black and George H. Hitchings "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment".^[42]
• 1991: Doris Malkin Curtis became the first woman president of the Geological Society of America.^[43]
• 1992: Edith M. Flanigen became the first woman awarded the Perkin Medal (widely considered the highest honor in American industrial chemistry) for her outstanding achievements in applied chemistry.^[44][45] The medal especially recognized her syntheses of aluminophosphate and silicoaluminophosphate molecular sieves as new classes of materials.^[45]
• 1995: Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Edward B. Lewis and Eric F. Wieschaus, "for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development".^[46]
• 2004: Lucy Sanders co-founded the National Center for Women & Information Technology.^[47]
• 2004: Linda B. Buck received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Richard Axel "for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system".^[48]
• 2008: Francoise Barre-Sinoussi received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Harald zur Hausen and Luc Montagnier, "for their discovery of HIV, human immunodeficiency virus".^[49]
• 2009: Carol W. Greider received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with Elizabeth H. Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase".^[50]
• 2009: Ada E. Yonath, along with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz, received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome".^[51]
• 2012: Clara Lazen, then a fifth grader, discovered the molecule tetranitratoxycarbon.^[52]
• 2014: May-Britt Moser received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, shared with Edvard Moser and John O'Keefe, "for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain".^[53]