It is good that there is a day for remembering mothers – May 10th is Mother’s Day. A good day to take a close look at the women inventors as a whole.

Overall, the percentage of women inventors is very less. Many reasons are attributed to this. One major reason in the early days was the fact that until around 1850, anything which a woman invented belonged to her husband, according to the law! The law is no longer there, but still, only 11% of US patents were awarded to women in 2002. So, there is a lot of improvement needed in this area.

In spite of all this, there have been a lot of women inventors, if you look at past and present history. One famous example is that of Marie Curie, who became the first person to receive two Nobel prizes, one in Physics and another in Chemistry. Marie Curie was born as Marie Sklodowska in Poland and went to France for her studies. You can read about Marie Curie’s inventions here.

Another famous woman inventor/scientist is Mary Anning. She collected skeletons of many extinct animals. She is not well known because her family depended on her, and she had to sell many of these fossils for money.

Then there is Josephine Garis Cochran, the inventor of the dishwasher, Amanda Jones who invented the vacuum process of preserving food, Disa Rubenbaur who developed biodegradable fast food containers, Maria Telkes who invented a solar heating system, Gertrude Elion who received a Nobel prize for her long research to find drugs for fighting leukemia, and so many others.

Throughout history, there were women inventors. But the number of women inventors is still a significantly smaller number than it should be, considering the talented women out there!