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
She won physics in 1903 with Pierre and Becquerel, and chemistry alone in 1911.
Q 02Which two elements did Marie Curie discover?
Radium and polonium
Polonium was named for her native Poland.
Q 03What word did Marie Curie coin for the phenomenon she studied?
Radioactivity
She and Pierre worked in a converted shed that had been a dissecting room.
Q 04Why were Marie and Pierre Curie's remains sealed in lead when moved to the Pantheon in 1995?
They were still radioactive
Her notebooks are also still radioactive and kept in lead-lined boxes.
Q 05Ada Lovelace was the daughter of which famous poet?
Lord Byron
He left a month after she was born; her mother pushed her into mathematics to ward off his 'insanity'.
Q 06Ada Lovelace's famous notes described a program for which proposed machine?
Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine
Note G laid out a method for computing Bernoulli numbers, often called the first computer program.
Q 07Which mathematical sequence did Ada Lovelace's Note G show how to compute?
Bernoulli numbers
The engine was never built, so the program was never run.
Q 08Which astronaut asked Katherine Johnson to recheck the computer's calculations before his 1962 orbital flight?
John Glenn
She had earlier calculated the trajectory for Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
Q 09Which actress played Katherine Johnson in Hidden Figures?
Taraji P. Henson
Johnson received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2015.
Q 10Rosalind Franklin's most famous X-ray image of DNA is known as what?
Photo 51
Her student Raymond Gosling actually took it, and Wilkins showed it to Watson without her permission.
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
She believed programming should read like English, and her compiler translated English terms into machine code.
Q 13What did Grace Hopper's team famously find stuck in a relay of the Harvard Mark II in 1947?
A moth
It was taped into the log with the note 'first actual case of bug being found'.
What rank did Grace Hopper reach in the US Navy?
Q 21How did Emmy Noether lecture at Gottingen when the faculty refused to appoint a woman?
Under David Hilbert's name
She had already worked seven years unpaid at Erlangen.
Q 22Chien-Shiung Wu's famous experiment proved that what is not conserved?
Parity
Her colleagues Lee and Yang won the 1957 Nobel; she got the first Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978.
Q 23Chien-Shiung Wu worked on which wartime effort, separating uranium isotopes?
The Manhattan Project
Her nickname was 'the First Lady of Physics'.
Rear admiral
She retired as the oldest active-duty commissioned officer in the Navy, at 79.
Q 15Hollywood star Hedy Lamarr co-invented a frequency-hopping guidance system with which composer?
George Antheil
Its principles underpin Bluetooth and early Wi-Fi.
Q 16Hedy Lamarr's frequency-hopping patent was intended to guide what?
Torpedoes
It aimed to defeat radio jamming by the Axis powers.
Q 17Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman in space aboard which shuttle in 1992?
Endeavour
A trained physician, she had served with the Peace Corps in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
Q 18Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with whom for CRISPR gene editing?
Emmanuelle Charpentier
They first proposed CRISPR-Cas9 as a programmable genome editor in 2012.
Q 19Barbara McClintock won the 1983 Nobel Prize for discovering what in maize?
Transposons, or 'jumping genes'
Scepticism about her work led her to stop publishing her data in 1953.
Q 20Emmy Noether's famous theorem links symmetry with what?
Conservation laws
Einstein and Weyl called her the most important woman in the history of mathematics.
Q 24In which national park did Jane Goodall study chimpanzees for more than 60 years?
Gombe Stream, Tanzania
She began in 1960 under palaeontologist Louis Leakey, whom she first reached by phone while working as a secretary.
Q 25What was the name of the toy chimpanzee Jane Goodall's father gave her as a child?
Jubilee
Her mother's friends thought it would frighten her.
Q 26Vera Rubin's studies of galaxy rotation curves provided key evidence for what?
Dark matter
A major observatory in Chile now bears her name.
Q 27Lise Meitner was instrumental in discovering nuclear fission but was left out of which honour?
The 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry
It went solely to Otto Hahn; she was nominated for a Nobel 48 times in all.
Q 28Lise Meitner fled Nazi Germany in July 1938 to which country?
The Netherlands
Physicist Dirk Coster helped her escape; she later settled in Sweden.
Q 29Who was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, in 2014?
Maryam Mirzakhani
The Iranian Stanford professor died of breast cancer at 40, three years later.
Q 30Who was the first woman in space?
Valentina Tereshkova
She flew solo on Vostok 6 in 1963 and remains the only woman to fly a solo mission.