Influential women in history

First female doctor

Elizabeth Blackwell overcame considerable adversity to become the first woman to receive a medical degree. Born in 1821 in England, Blackwell lived through a time where society had stringent gender roles and faced constant rejection, discrimination and criticism before she was finally accepted into Geneva College, New York in 1847 by faculty vote as a practical joke.

In an all-male student cohort, Blackwell was denied access to facilities, forced to sit alone in lectures, and endured resentment and outrage from peers who felt she was perverting a title held with such prestige and honour. But this did nothing to discourage Blackwell, who graduated top in her class two years later – becoming the first woman to receive an M.D. degree from an American medical school and finally earning the respect of her classmates.

However, Blackwell was further met with unsurmountable prejudice after medical school. She was refused jobs in countless hospitals, snubbed by patients who refused to be treated by a female doctor and was often assigned nursing roles. After her pursuit of a career in surgery in London was cut short due to inflammation in one eye (destroying her sight), she returned to America in 1851 and opened her own general practice. This was yet again met with discrimination from the public who were mistrustful of female physicians.

With support from friends, Dr. Blackwell opened a small infirmary in 1857 with her sister with the aim to provide free healthcare for poor women and also offer employment opportunities for women in the medical field. She founded her own medical college in New York a decade later before moving back to London, taking up a professor role at the newly established London School of Medicine for Women.

Dr. Blackwell continued her campaign for reform and the promotion of women in medical science until her death in 1910 at the age of 89.

Engineer / Innovator / Nobel Prize Winner

In 2018, Frances H. Arnold (Ph.D.) became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her groundbreaking work in the ‘directed evolution of enzymes’. Her discovery into how desired proteins can be manipulated through the evolutionary process of beneficial mutations and propagation has led to the manufacturing of more environmentally-friendly chemical substances we use today in pharmaceuticals, pesticides and renewable fuels.

Arnold’s accomplishments throughout her life have been nothing short of extraordinary. In addition to the Nobel Prize, she has received many other awards including The Draper Prize and the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 2011 - the latter of which was presented to her by President Barack Obama. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. She was the first woman to be elected to each of the three National Academies in the US: National Academy of Engineering in 2000, National Academy of Medicine in 2004 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2008. In 2016, she became the first woman to win the Millennium Technology Prize. Arnold is a fellow to several academies in America and one in the UK.

She was listed as BBC’s 100 women in 2018, was named a member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences by Pope Francis in 2019, was recently announced as one of two females to ever co-chair the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) by President Biden in 2021. In what she jokingly claimed as the greatest accolade of her life, she also appeared on the hit TV series ‘The Big Bang Theory’ – as herself!