Women have played, and continue to play, a pivotal part in some of society’s most important moments. In this article, I will put the spotlight on three women who have either worked in engineering or technology and how their research or inventions have helped or continue to help society.

Firstly, not only am I a woman with a love for the chemical world, but I also have an avid interest in the world beyond our own, and how we explore places past Earth’s atmosphere. This has led me to follow the progress of Artemis II, the US space mission that launched on April 1^st of this year, and the crew members who were involved in this exciting adventure to the Moon.

The people aboard Artemis II have journeyed to a part of space that no human has been before. One of those contributing to the mission is an engineer called Christina Koch, an American engineer and NASA astronaut who has been into space more than once. She graduated with two BSc degrees in electrical engineering and physics from North Carolina State University in 2001, and a MSc in electrical engineering from the same university in 2002. Koch went on to graduate from the NASA Academy program, before working as a research associate in the US Antarctic Program between 2004 and 2007. She then helped to develop space instruments suitable for researching radiation particles for NASA missions, before going to the International Space Station (ISS) as a flight engineer in March 2019. In October 2019, Koch and her colleague Jessica Meir were the first women to do an all-female spacewalk to fix a control unit that was located outside the ISS. In February 2020, she broke the record for the longest continuous time in space by a woman (which was 289 days), after spending 328 days on the ISS. This mission provided key research for future space exploration to the Moon and Mars, how long spaceflights affect the body and how plant growth can be affected in microgravity.

In April 2026, Koch returned to space as a mission specialist aboard the Artemis II spacecraft with three other crew members. The aim of this 10-day mission was to successfully conduct a flyby of the Moon, which meant travelling further into space than any of Artemis’ predecessors. By participating in this mission, Koch was the first woman to travel beyond Earth’s low orbit and then within the vicinity of the Moon. By being involved in two spaceflights, Christina Koch has contributed to research that will help humans’ understanding of the world beyond our own, and how we can progress further into space and ultimately send people back to the Moon or land on Mars.

Another influential female engineer who deserves a mention is Beatrice Shilling. I first heard the name when I was younger after my father told me about her, and how she arguably helped to change the course of World War II between 1939 and 1945. Shilling attended Manchester University to study engineering. She finished her BSc in electrical engineering in 1932 before getting her MSc in mechanical engineering a year later from the same institution. In 1933, the job market in Britain was poor due to the Great Depression after the Wall Street Crash of 1929, which caused a global collapse in trade, industry and employment. Despite this, Shilling stayed in Manchester and got a job as a research assistant researching how pressure and compression ratios influenced engine behaviour. She also built parts for test apparatus and repaired engines and superchargers during her time as a research assistant.

In 1939, the outbreak of World War II meant that the role of engineers became even more vital. By 1939, Shilling had left her job in Manchester and had started working at the Royal Aircraft Establishment (RAE) in Farnborough. In January 1940, pilots of Hurricanes first reported issues with starting the engines in the cold British weather. These were then followed by reports of problems with engines cutting out in Hurricanes and Spitfires whenever the pilots went into a negative-g dive, which was a huge disadvantage when pursuing or escaping German planes in a dogfight. Shilling and her team at the RAE were given the task of working out what caused the issues in these iconic British planes and then finding a solution. The problem came from the carburettors – a device that is installed in an engine to vaporise fuel and mix it with air before combustion. When the aircraft were pushed into downward acceleration during a dive, the state of ‘negative gravity’ was produced, which meant that anything not held in place (such as fuel in the carburettor) floated upwards. The engine would then become fuel-starved due to it moving away from the metering holes at the bottom of the carburettor and this caused the engine to cut out mid-flight. Proposed early solutions to the problem caused oversupply of fuel to the engine, which meant the fuel could not burn as it was too saturated. It was Shilling who discovered that having inlet needle valves open during the fuel delivery to the carburettors would prevent the engine from either cutting out or having fuel rush in. She developed a small, brass restrictor that controlled the fuel flow, which was then tested… results from these experiments were highly successful and so these restrictors were fitted to the affected aircraft between late 1940 and early 1941. By solving the problem with Britain’s fighters and developing a simple yet effective device that could be easily installed into existing engines, Beatrice Shilling ultimately helped change the course of World War II by allowing the pilots of Spitfires and Hurricanes to fight German aircrafts with no disadvantage.

Finally, another woman who contributed to the war effort during World War II was Hedy Lamarr. Lamarr, who was born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in Vienna, started her career as an actress in Europe before moving to Hollywood after being offered a film contract when she was in London. However, at the beginning of World War II, Lamarr briefly moved away from acting and helped invent a ‘radio guidance system’ for the Allied forces, after being taught about the technology by her father when she was younger. The technology used frequency hopping to stop radio jamming by the Germans and their allies, by spreading the signal across multiple frequencies. This ultimately created a method of communication that was both safe and secret. In modern times, the principles of Lamarr’s invention were used to develop Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which both use spread spectrum technology to protect our data from being intercepted and interfered with by malicious parties.

Hedy Lamarr, Beatrice Shilling and, more recently, Christina Koch are only a small selection of influential women who I believe have had, or are having, a positive impact on society. Without these strong, intelligent and brave women paving the way for future generations, who knows what would have happened during pivotal moments in history or how advanced our research would be without them. Now, modern women are continuing to contribute to important and lifesaving work that may not have been possible by the generations of women in STEMM before us, and I hope this article has given an important insight into some of these characters to whom we owe so much.

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