10 Groundbreaking Women Scientists Written Off By History including Vera Rubin, Cecilia Payne, Chien Shiung Wu, Nettie Stevens, Ida Tacke, Esther Lederberg, Lise Meitner, Henrietta Leavitt, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Rosalind Franklin. Article

Valentina Tereshkova - In 1963, Tereshkova became the first woman to travel into space. Having spent a total of 71 hours out there, orbiting the Earth 48 times, she returned to solid ground having been in space longer than any other astronaut at the time.

Marie Curie was the first woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win two, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different fields (physics and chemistry). Yet even so, she was turned down for membership of the prestigious French Academie des Sciences in 1911, the very year she went on to win her second Nobel Prize.

Hollywood actress Hedy Lamarr was involved in creating a “frequency-hopping spread-spectrum” system – a device she hoped would protect Allied radio communications from being intercepted by Axis forces. The same technology now underpins both cell phones and Wi-Fi. Years later, she received her long-overdue recognition when she won the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Margherita Hack, was an astrophysicist who explained her research on the stars in plain language for the public and who championed civil rights in her native Italy. She had headed an astronomical observatory. She was when she died.

https://phys.org/news/2013-06-italian-astrophysicist-margherita-hack-dies.html