47 Nonfiction Book Recommendations for International Day of Women & Girls in Science

The best books on women in science, from history and biography to group portraits and memoir

Yesterday, I shared a thread of book recommendations over on Bluesky to celebrate International Day of Women & Girls in Science. I thought I’d share the recs here, too, to make it easier to access. This year, it feels particularly important to celebrate this occasion since Trump’s anti-DEI order means the words “women” and “female” will get your research paper flagged by the National Science Foundation and NASA was ordered to remove mentions of “women in leadership” from its website.

Unearthing the stories of women in science is my passion, so I hope you'll consider reading one of my books or one of the books I recommend. Don't let the government erase these women, this work.

My Books:

• Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History

• Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine

Books I’ve Read and Enjoyed:

• Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Grand Canyon by Melissa L. Sevigny

• The Disordered Cosmos: A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

• Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science by Catherine McNeur

• 18 Tiny Deaths: The Untold Story of the Woman Who Invented Modern Forensics by Bruce Goldfarb

• The Black Angels: The Untold Story of the Nurses Who Helped Cure Tuberculosis

  by Maria Smilios

• The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars by Dava Sobel

• The Scalpel and the Silver Bear: The First Navajo Woman Surgeon Combines Western Medicine and Traditional Healing by Lori Alvord and Elizabeth Cohen Van Pelt

• Twice as Hard: The Stories of Black Women Who Fought to Become Physicians, from the Civil War to the 21st Century by Jasmine Brown

• American Poison: A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who Battled for Environmental Justice by Daniel Stone

• Emilie Du Chatelet: Daring Genius of the Enlightenment by Judith P. Zinsser

• Wild Girls: How the Outdoors Shaped the Women Who Challenged a Nation by Tiya Miles

• A Lab of One's Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War by Patricia Fara

Other Books That Look Intriguing

• Sharks Don't Sink: Adventures of a Rogue Shark Scientist by Jasmin Graham

• Forces of Nature: The Women Who Changed Science by Anna Reser, Leila McNeill

• Breaking Through: My Life in Science by Katalin Karikó

• The Beauty in Breaking: A Memoir by Michele Harper

• Madame Wu Chien-Shiung: The First Lady of Physics Research by Tsai-Chien Chiang

• The Exceptions: Nancy Hopkins, MIT, and the Fight for Women in Science by Kate Zernike

• One Step Sideways, Three Steps Forward: One Woman's Path to Becoming a Biologist by B. Rosemary Grant

• A Lab of One's Own: One Woman's Personal Journey Through Sexism in Science by Rita Colwell and Sharon Bertsch McGrayne

• Legacy: A Black Physician Reckons with Racism in Medicine by Uché Blackstock

• Women in Science Now: Stories and Strategies for Achieving Equity by Lisa M. P. Munoz

• Candace Pert: Genius, Greed, and Madness in the World of Science by Pamela Ryckman

• A Portrait of the Scientist as a Young Woman: A Memoir by Lindy Elkins-Tanton

• Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA by Brenda Maddox

• Starstruck: A Memoir of Astrophysics and Finding Light in the Dark by Sarafina El-Badry Nance

• Lab Girl: A Memoir by Hope Jahren

• The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science

  by Julie Des Jardins

• The Elements of Marie Curie: How the Glow of Radium Lit a Path for Women in Science by Dava Sobel

• Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II by Liza Mundy

• Soundings: The Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor by Hali Felt

• Visionary Women: How Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, Jane Goodall, and Alice Waters Changed Our World by Andrea Barnet

• The Fossil Hunter: Dinosaurs, Evolution, and the Woman Whose Discoveries Changed the World by Shelley Emling

• Women in the History of Science: A Sourcebook edited by Hannah Wills, Sadie Harrison, Erika Lynn Jones, Rebecca Martin, Farrah Lawrence-Mackey

• The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson

• Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race by Margot Lee Shetterly

• Intertwined: Women, Nature, and Climate Justice by Rebecca Kormos

• Her Space, Her Time: How Trailblazing Women Scientists Decoded the Hidden Universe by Shohini Ghose

• What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin by Donovan Moore

• Minerva's French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France by Nina Rattner Gelbart

• Holding The Knife's Edge: Journeys of Black Female Scientists by Dr. Thato Motlhalamme and Dr. Evodia Setati

• African American Women Chemists by Jeannette Brown

• My Remarkable Journey: A Memoir by Katherine Johnson

• Life on Other Planets: A Memoir of Finding My Place in the Universe by Aomawa Shields

• All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes by Sue Black DBE, FRSE

More About Me

Olivia Campbell is the New York Times bestselling author of Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine and Sisters in Science: How Four Women Physicists Escaped Nazi Germany and Made Scientific History. Signed copies are available online at Newtown Bookshop and Doylestown Bookshop.

A seasoned journalist and essayist, her work centers on history, science, and health as it relates to women, nature/environment/ecology, psychology, and the intersections of all these areas.

Campbell is a thesis advisor for her alma mater, Johns Hopkins University's science writing master’s degree program, and a freelance editor at Parents magazine and Everyday Health. She’s also the resident “science of folklore” contributor at National Geographic. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, The Guardian, Washington Post, New York Magazine, Smithsonian Magazine, Scientific American, Aeon, and History.com, among others. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband, sons, and cats.

Find out more on her website.