16 Women’s Discoveries We Mistakenly Attribute to Men

In 1904, Elizabeth Magie Phillips received a patent for "The Landlord's Game," a precursor to and inspiration for Charles Darrow's Monopoly. Phillips designed her game as a protest against monopolists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. He eventually sold his version of the game to Parker Brothers.

Decades after Katherine Johnson ran the numbers and discovered the exact path for the Freedom 7 spacecraft to enter space for the first time in 1961 (and later for the Apollo 11 mission to land on the moon in 1969), Johnson's life and work was brought to the big screen in the hit movie "Hidden Figures." Until then, her work went largely unrecognized and was credited to the men she worked with (and for), who not only dismissed her because she was a woman but also because she was African American.

Nuclear fission, where the nuclei of atoms split during reactions, releasing energy, was discovered by Lise Meitner, an Austrian-Swedish physicist who studied nuclear physics and radioactivity. She was studying uranium with her lab partner, Otto Hahn, who got credit for her work and won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944.

Caresse Crosby, who helped usher in writers Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin and Charles Bukowski, among others, invented and patented the first "backless" bra in 1914. Basically, it was the first modern bra, and a rebellion against the discomfort and stricture of corsets. Crosby is often forgotten in bra history since she sold her patent to the Warner Brothers Corset company in 1914. Fun fact: The whippet dog in the picture was named Clytoris.

Ada Harris claimed a patent for hair straightening wands back in 1893, though Marcel Grateau is the man credited for their invention. His claim to fame, however, was the curling iron—a big difference we understand even today.

Artist Margaret Keane is the creator of "Big Eyes" paintings, visual hallmarks of the 1960s. She created the name and look, but fans often credited her husband, Walter Keane, for the works, since he had been selling her paintings as his own and without her permission the decade before. She found out and confronted him, but he threatened her. She worked away, mostly unknown, while he went on to great fame. They divorced, she went public, he challenged her, and it culminated in a courtroom drama where, to prove the true artist behind the works, the two had to paint a piece, side by side, in front of a judge. (She won.) Her works are still for sale.

Photo via Keane Eyes Gallery

Grace Murray Hopper created the first programming language to operate Harvard's Mark I computer (IBM's computer used to assist operations in World War II). She pioneered COBOL, a programming language that is still used today. History typically notes that John von Neumann started the Mark I's first program, but it wouldn't have been possible without Hopper's codes.

Esther Lederberg discovered the lambda phage, a bacterial virus that is widely used as a tool to study gene regulation and genetic recombination. She also invented the technique in isolating and analyzing bacterial mutants to track resistance. She often worked with her husband, Joshua Lederberg, who received the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for discoveries on how bacteria mate.

While working as a research assistant at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered irregular radio pulses. After showing her adviser, she worked with the team to figure out what those pulses were. That is how we know about neuron stars, commonly known as pulsars. She didn't receive credit for the discovery, though her advisor, Antony Hewish (along with Martin Ryle), got the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1974.

Who knew the flat-bottomed paper bag had to be invented? It was a game-changer nonetheless. The brains behind the bag-maker, Margaret Knight, designed a wooden model of the machine used to assemble the bags. The patent office rejected it, saying the model needed to be made of iron in order to be patented. While she worked on that, Charles Annan stole the idea, made the model and got the patent (and credit) for Knight's work. Knight, however, filed a patent interference lawsuit, which she won and subsequently received the patent.

Candace Pert has done more than anyone in understanding the brain on drugs. As a neuroscience graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, she discovered the receptor that allows opiates to lock into the brain. The discovery led to an award for her professor, Dr. Solomon Snyder. Pert wrote a letter of protest, highlighting which of her specific contributions were necessary for the discovery. Dr. Snyder simply told her, "That's how the game is played."

Back in the 1800s, Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, created the first computer program. The problem is that there was no computer to run it on. Her friend and fellow mathematician Charles Babbage applied the sequence of commands to a machine that he designed. And so it is Babbage that is credited for the first proto-computer.

Photo via Science Museum

Nettie Stevens is the first woman to make a name for herself as a biologist. She is the first person to realize the connection between chromosomes and sex determination. But it was her mentor, E.B. Wilson, who got the credit. He published papers explaining the connection before she could and, therefore, is more well-known for the discovery.

The first X-ray photographs of DNA, taken by a research student working under the supervision of Rosalind Franklin in 1952, revealed that a molecule's structure is a double helix, not just a single helix. James Watson and Francis Crick were later credited with discovering the double helix structure, in 1953, and were subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. Franklin received little credit in her lifetime for her contribution.

Chien-Shiung Wu was often called the Chinese Madame Curie. An American, she worked on the Manhattan Project and developed the technique for separating uranium metal, which led to the development of the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Later, in the 1950s, she conducted the Wu experiment in electromagnetic interactions. Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang had proposed a similar theory and were credited with the results of the Wu experiment. They won the Nobel Prize for it in 1957.

Mary Anderson was riding in a streetcar in the snow when she first thought of windshield wipers. She patented her idea in 1903 and tried selling them to companies. None bit at the opportunity. But in the 1950s and '60s, companies revisited the need when cars were able to go faster. But by then, Anderson's patent had expired and Robert Kearns, who invented a similar idea and patented it, got credit for them.