Throughout history there have supposedly been women and African Americans credited with scientific discoveries and inventions. The black invention rabbit hole is not one I want to jump into right now, but it has ridiculous claims of inventing stuff like peanut butter and is full of lies as well.
Women and African Americans weren't intelligent or creative enough to actually contribute to science, so what often happened was that they were treated as a type of #meat-computer . We didn't have actual computers or the computers were lacking a lot of the time, so when you hear of a woman discovering a star, it's because a real scientist hired her to stare at a 10 inch region of the sky for 8 hours a day and take notes of everything she saw. It was just rote monkey work. Similarly when you see of African American women in movies such as "hidden figures", they were essentially just meat computers that did the boring tasks while actual white men made the real science happen. Here is a list of meat computers that you will often see given credit as being great scientists.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt – Discovered the period-luminosity relationship of Cepheid variable stars, which became essential for measuring cosmic distances.
Annie Jump Cannon – Developed the Harvard Classification System (O, B, A, F, G, K, M) still used to classify stars by temperature.
Williamina Fleming – Discovered the Horsehead Nebula and classified thousands of stars while working at Harvard Observatory.
Katherine Johnson – Mathematician at NASA who calculated trajectories for the Mercury and Apollo missions, including Apollo 11's moon landing.
Dorothy Vaughan – Became NASA’s first Black female supervisor and taught herself and her team FORTRAN to transition from human to digital computing.
Mary Jackson – NASA’s first Black female engineer who worked on aerodynamics and advocated for women and minorities in STEM.
Joan Clarke – Worked at Bletchley Park as a codebreaker, helping decipher the German Enigma code alongside Alan Turing.
Beatrice “Tilly” Shilling – British mathematician and engineer who developed a fix for the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine used in WWII fighter planes.
Raye Montague – The first person to design a naval ship by computer, breaking racial and gender barriers in the U.S. Navy.
Grace Hopper – Developed the first compiler for a programming language and was instrumental in the creation of COBOL.
Black Human Computers
Christine Darden – NASA mathematician and aerospace engineer who became an expert in supersonic flight and sonic boom prediction.
Annie Easley – NASA mathematician and computer scientist who developed software for rocket propulsion systems, including the Centaur upper-stage rocket.
Euphemia Lofton Haynes – The first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics in the U.S., later working to improve math education.
Melba Roy Mouton – Led NASA’s computing division that calculated satellite trajectories for Echo, Apollo, and early communications satellites.
Miriam Mann – One of NASA’s earliest Black human computers who worked to remove segregation signs in the Langley computing office.
Dorothy Hoover – NASA mathematician who contributed to aerodynamic and flight research during the early space program.
Gloria R. Champine – NASA human computer who worked on calculations for spaceflight trajectories.
Mary Winston Jackson – NASA aerospace engineer who helped improve spacecraft aerodynamics and pushed for diversity in the workplace.
