Women in STEM Trivia
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60 free Women in STEM trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
52 free Women in STEM trivia questions with answers. Women have discovered elements, written the first computer program, found the first pulsar and mapped the code of life, often without the credit. This quiz covers 30 of them: Marie Curie's two Nobels, Ada Lovelace's Note G, Katherine Johnson's checks for John Glenn, Rosalind Franklin's Photo 51, Grace Hopper's moth, Hedy Lamarr's frequency hopping, Mae Jemison and Sally Ride, Lise Meitner and Jocelyn Bell Burnell's missing Nobels, Jane Goodall's chimpanzees, Maryam Mirzakhani's Fields Medal and recent laureates from Doudna to Kariko. Easy questions cover the first woman in space and the book Silent Spring. The hard ones want the toy that started Goodall's career, the number of orbits Tereshkova flew and the sequence Lovelace's program computed. It works for a classroom, a Women's History Month event or a pub quiz round. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biographies, and each question carries the sentence that backs it up.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Marie Curie is the only person to have won Nobel Prizes in which two different sciences?
Physics and chemistry
Physics and chemistry: she shared the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel, then won the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry alone.
Q 02Which two elements did Marie Curie discover?
Radium and polonium
Radium and polonium: she and Pierre Curie announced polonium in July 1898, naming it for her native Poland, and radium in December 1898.
Q 03What word did Marie Curie coin for the phenomenon she studied?
Radioactivity
Radioactivity: Marie Curie coined the term in 1898 while studying the rays uranium emits, proposing that the emission was a property of the atom itself.
Q 04What did Marie Curie organise for French field hospitals during World War I?
Mobile X-ray units
Mobile X-ray units: Curie fitted vans with radiography equipment, nicknamed 'petites Curies', and drove them to the front so surgeons could locate bullets and shrapnel in wounded soldiers.
Q 05Ada Lovelace was the daughter of which famous poet?
Lord Byron
Lord Byron: the poet separated from Ada's mother Annabella weeks after her birth in December 1815 and left England for good; Annabella steered Ada toward mathematics.
Q 06Ada Lovelace's famous notes described a program for which proposed machine?
Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine
Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine: Lovelace translated Luigi Menabrea's 1842 paper on the proposed machine and added notes roughly three times longer than the original, including her famous Note G.
Q 07Which mathematical sequence did Ada Lovelace's Note G show how to compute?
Bernoulli numbers
Bernoulli numbers: Note G laid out a stepwise table for Babbage's proposed engine to calculate them, but the machine was never built, so the program never ran.
Q 08Which astronaut asked Katherine Johnson to recheck the computer's calculations before his 1962 orbital flight?
John Glenn
John Glenn: before his Friendship 7 flight in February 1962 he asked for Johnson to check the IBM computer's orbital figures by hand; she had earlier computed Alan Shepard's 1961 trajectory.
Q 09Which actress played Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures?
Taraji P. Henson
Taraji P. Henson played Katherine Johnson in the 2016 film Hidden Figures, with Octavia Spencer as Dorothy Vaughan; the film earned three Oscar nominations including Best Picture.
Q 10Rosalind Franklin's most famous X-ray image of DNA is known as what?
Photo 51
Photo 51: the X-ray diffraction image of B-form DNA taken in May 1952 by her student Raymond Gosling, which Maurice Wilkins showed James Watson in early 1953 without her knowledge.
Q 11Franklin earned her 1945 PhD for research on which material?
Coal
Her wartime work at the British Coal Utilisation Research Association led to the doctorate in 1945.
Q 12Grace Hopper was central to creating which English-based programming language in 1959?
COBOL
COBOL: the 1959 CODASYL committee built it largely on Hopper's FLOW-MATIC, the English-like business language she had developed for UNIVAC, earning her the nickname 'Grandma COBOL'.
Q 13What did Grace Hopper's team famously find stuck in a relay of the Harvard Mark II in 1947?
A moth
A moth: on 9 September 1947 operators taped the insect into the Mark II logbook with the note 'First actual case of bug being found'; the page is held by the Smithsonian.
Q 21How did Emmy Noether lecture at Gottingen when the faculty refused to appoint a woman?
Under David Hilbert's name
Under David Hilbert's name: from 1915 the Gottingen faculty blocked her habilitation, so her courses were advertised as Hilbert's with Noether as 'assistant'; she had already spent seven unpaid years at Erlangen.
Q 22Chien-Shiung Wu's famous experiment proved that what is not conserved?
Parity
Parity: Wu's 1956 cobalt-60 beta-decay experiment showed the weak interaction distinguishes left from right; Lee and Yang, who proposed the test, won the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics.
Q 23Chien-Shiung Wu worked on which wartime effort, separating uranium isotopes?
The Manhattan Project
Q 14What rank did Grace Hopper reach in the US Navy?
Rear admiral
Rear admiral: promoted to commodore by special presidential appointment in her seventies, she held that one-star rank when it was renamed rear admiral (lower half) in 1985, retiring in 1986 aged 79.
Q 15Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr co-invented a frequency-hopping guidance system with which composer?
George Antheil
George Antheil: the avant-garde composer of Ballet Mecanique worked out the synchronised hopping mechanism with Lamarr, borrowing the idea of a player-piano roll; their patent was granted in August 1942.
Q 16Hedy Lamarr's frequency-hopping patent was intended to guide what?
Torpedoes
Torpedoes: the 1942 'Secret Communication System' patent hopped a radio-guided torpedo's control signal across 88 frequencies so enemy ships could not jam it.
Q 17Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman in space aboard which shuttle in 1992?
Endeavour
Endeavour: Jemison flew on STS-47 in September 1992 as a mission specialist; a trained physician, she had earlier served as a Peace Corps medical officer in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Q 18Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with whom for CRISPR gene editing?
Emmanuelle Charpentier
Emmanuelle Charpentier: the French microbiologist and Doudna published the 2012 Science paper showing CRISPR-Cas9 could be programmed to cut DNA at chosen sites, and shared the 2020 prize.
Q 19Barbara McClintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize for discovering what in maize?
Transposons, or 'jumping genes'
Transposons, or 'jumping genes': McClintock showed by 1951 that maize genetic elements could move between chromosomes, altering kernel colour patterns; scepticism led her to stop publishing the data in 1953.
Q 20Emmy Noether's famous theorem links symmetry with what?
Conservation laws
Conservation laws: Noether's 1918 theorem shows every continuous symmetry of a physical system yields a conserved quantity, so symmetry under time shifts gives conservation of energy.
The Manhattan Project: Wu joined Columbia's Substitute Alloy Materials laboratory in 1944, improving gaseous-diffusion separation of uranium isotopes; colleagues nicknamed her 'the First Lady of Physics'.
Q 24In which national park did Jane Goodall study chimpanzees for more than 60 years?
Gombe Stream, Tanzania
Gombe Stream, Tanzania: Goodall arrived at the reserve on Lake Tanganyika in July 1960, sponsored by palaeoanthropologist Louis Leakey, and the chimpanzee study she founded there ran for more than six decades.
Q 25What was the name of the toy chimpanzee Jane Goodall's father gave her as a child?
Jubilee
Jubilee: the stuffed chimpanzee, named after the first chimp born at London Zoo, was given to her by her father when she was a toddler; her mother's friends warned it would frighten her.
Q 26Vera Rubin's studies of galaxy rotation curves provided key evidence for what?
Dark matter
Dark matter: Rubin and Kent Ford found in the 1970s that stars at a galaxy's edge orbit as fast as those near its centre, implying unseen mass; the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile is named for her.
Q 27Lise Meitner was instrumental in discovering nuclear fission but was left out of which honour?
The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry went solely to Otto Hahn for discovering fission, although Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch had worked out the physics of what Hahn's experiments showed.
Q 28Lise Meitner fled Nazi Germany in July 1938 to which country?
The Netherlands
The Netherlands: Dutch physicist Dirk Coster escorted her by train across the border on 13 July 1938, after which she moved on to Stockholm's Nobel Institute for Physics in Sweden.
Q 29Who was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, in 2014?
Maryam Mirzakhani
Maryam Mirzakhani, an Iranian-born Stanford professor, won the 2014 Fields Medal for work on the geometry of Riemann surfaces and moduli spaces; she died of breast cancer three years later, in 2017.
Q 30Who was the first woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova
Valentina Tereshkova flew aboard Vostok 6 in June 1963, spending almost three days in orbit as the first woman in space, selected from a pool of amateur parachutists.