10 Women Who Advanced Our Understanding of Life on Earth

English fossil hunter and amateur anatomist Mary Anning was celebrated for her discovery of iconic dinosaur specimens that assisted in the early development of the field of paleontology. Her excavations also aided the careers of many British scientists by providing them with specimens to study and framed a significant part of Earth’s geologic history. Some scientists note that fossils recovered by Anning may have also contributed, in part, to the theory of evolution put forth by English naturalist Charles Darwin.

A prominent figure in the history of America’s environmental movement, biologist Rachel Carson was well known for her writings on environmental pollution and the natural history of the sea. From 1936 to 1952 she worked as an aquatic biologist for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (from 1940 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service). During that time, she wrote Under the Sea-Wind (1941) and The Sea Around Us (1951), which won a National Book Award. Her most widely acclaimed work was Silent Spring (1962), which became a best seller and drew attention to the long-term consequences of environmental pollution.

Margaret Bryan Davis, an American behavioral biologist and paleoecologist, conducted pioneering research on palynology (the study of plant pollen and spores). In the 1950s, while a student at the University of Copenhagen, she studied pollen samples that had been deposited during an interglacial period (a relatively warm period between ice ages) in present-day Greenland. Later, working at the University of Michigan, she developed a new approach to the interpretation of pollen records. Her work provided important insight into the influence of environmental factors such as climatic variation on the structure of biological communities through time.

American oceanographer and explorer Sylvia Alice Earle studied marine algae and wrote books and created documentaries that helped to raise awareness of the dangers of overfishing and ocean pollution. She was perhaps best known, however, for her groundbreaking undersea expeditions. In 1970 she led the first all-female team of women aquanauts as part of the Tektite II experiment, a project designed to explore the marine realm and test the viability of deepwater habitats and the health effects of prolonged living in underwater structures. The habitat was located about 15 meters (50 feet) below the surface of Great Lameshur Bay off the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands. During the two-week experiment, she observed the effects of pollution on coral reefs firsthand. Occurring during a time when American women were just beginning to enter fields traditionally staffed by men, the Tektite II project captured the imagination of scientists and nonscientists alike because Earle’s team did the same work as previous all-male crews.

Kenyan politician and environmental activist Wangari Maathai became the first Black African woman to win a Nobel Prize when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Armed with degrees in biology and veterinary anatomy, Maathai was motivated by the idea that village women could improve the environment by planting trees to slow the processes of deforestation and desertification. In 1977 she founded the Green Belt Movement to focus on environmental conservation, tree planting, and women’s rights; by 2023 the movement had planted more than 50 million trees. In addition to her ecological work, Maathai was also an advocate for human rights, AIDS prevention, and women’s issues, and she frequently represented these concerns at meetings of the United Nations General Assembly. 

British ethologist Jane Goodall is best known for her research on the chimpanzees of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. In the 1950s she left school and went to Africa, where she pursued her interests in the study of animal behavior while working with Louis Leakey. She eventually established a camp in the Gombe Stream Game Reserve, where she could study the area’s chimpanzee population. This work culminated in a Ph.D. in ethology from the University of Cambridge, making her one of few individuals to receive a doctorate without having first earned a bachelor’s degree.

Mary Douglas Leakey was an archaeologist and paleoanthropologist who made several fossil finds of great importance in the understanding of human evolution. Working alongside Louis Leakey (her husband), she oversaw the excavation of various prehistoric sites in Kenya. Her skill at the painstaking work of excavation surpassed her husband’s, whose brilliance lay in interpreting and publicizing the fossils that they uncovered. In 1948, on Rusinga Island in Lake Victoria, she discovered the skull of Proconsul africanus, an ancestor of both apes and early humans that lived about 25 million years ago. In 1959 at Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, she discovered the skull of an early hominin (member of the human lineage) that her husband named Zinjanthropus, or “eastern man,” though it is now regarded as Paranthropus, a type of australopith, or “southern ape.”

American aquatic biologist and educator Ruth Patrick was one of the early pioneers of the science of limnology, being best known for her work with diatoms and for her multidisciplinary approach to the study of aquatic ecosystems. Through her education and research, Patrick recognized the value of diatoms as pollution indicators in streams and sediments. In 1947 she founded the limnology department at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. One of the department’s first projects was a biological survey of the streams in the Conestoga River basin near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. This project was one of the first to employ a team of researchers with expertise in various subfields of aquatic biology, chemistry, and physics to survey ecosystems. Several researchers in other states quickly adopted her multidisciplinary approach.

Indian scientist and activist Vandana Shiva is known for her passionate defense of the environment. In 1982 she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy, an organization devoted to developing sustainable methods of agriculture, and she later founded Navdanya, a movement for biodiversity conservation and farmers’ rights. Shiva is perhaps best known as a critic of Asia’s Green Revolution, which she holds has led to pollution, a loss of indigenous seed diversity and traditional agricultural knowledge, and the troubling dependence of poor farmers on costly chemicals. She has authored numerous books and was the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award in 1993.

American ethologist and ornithologist Margaret Morse Nice conducted influential field studies of North American birds, including the song sparrow Melospiza melodia. While she lived in Oklahoma, Nice’s childhood passion for nature was reawakened. After reading a letter in her local newspaper that favored a September opening of the mourning dove (Zenaida macroura) hunting season, she commenced a study of the bird’s nesting behavior. Although the writer maintained that the birds concluded their nesting period in September and thus hunting could safely begin, Nice’s results indicated that they in fact nested into October. This experience, along with encouragement from her daughters, rekindled her interest in the study of birds. She later wrote (with her husband) The Birds of Oklahoma, a comprehensive 122-page survey of the species she encountered. The book was first published in 1924, and the revised edition was released in 1931. Nice eventually wrote more than 250 scientific papers, thousands of reviews, and other books, among which are The Watcher at the Nest (1939) and Development of Behavior in Precocial Birds (1962).