78 Women more important than Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan

Jane Addams: Won the Nobel Peace Prize and was a founder of the U.S. Settlement House Movement
Frances Allen: Won the Turing Award
Michèle Alliot-Marie: French Minister of Defence
Christiane Amanpour: Chief international correspondent for CNN
Maria Asunción Aramburuzabala: Mexico’s richest woman (Grupo Modelo, makers of Corona beer) Tabitha Babbit: American tool maker who invented the first circular saw used in a saw mill in 1813. She was a member of the Shaker community in Harvard, Massachusetts
Lotte Bailyn: Professor of Management (Organization Studies Group) at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Co-Director of the MIT Workplace Center
Emily Greene Balch: American academic, writer, and pacifist who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1946 (the prize that year was shared with John Mott), notably for her work with the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF)
Marina Berlusconi: Chairman of Italy’s largest magazine publisher, Mondadori
Anita Borg: Received the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award, Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery, Presidential Commission on the Advancement of Women and Minorities in Science, Engineering, and Technology, Founding director of the Institute for Women and Technology, started Systers (an e-mail list) and tech conference Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. The Anita Borg Prize is named in her honor, as is the Google Anita Borg Scholarship
Ana Patricia Botín: Chief executive of Spain’s Santander Investment
Shona Brown: Senior Vice President of Business Operations at Google
Linda B. Buck: American biologist best known for her work on the olfactory system. She and Richard Axel won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their work on olfactory receptors.
Pearl Buck: First American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature
Ho Ching: CEO of Temasek Holdings
Carla Cico: CEO of Brasil Telecom
Helen Clark: Prime Minister of New Zealand
Catherine ‘Cady’ Coleman: Mission Specialist Astronaut
Eileen Collins: Space Commander
Gerty Radnitz Cori: Together with her husband and Bernardo Houssay, received a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1947 for their discovery of how glycogen is broken down and resynthesized in the body, for use as a store and source of energy. In 2004, both were designated a ACS National Historical Chemical Landmark in recognition of their work that elucidated carbohydrate metabolism.
Marie Curie: Polish-French physicist and chemist. She was a pioneer in radioactivity, the first two-time Nobel laureate (the only one in two different sciences), and the first female professor at the Sorbonne Irene Joliot-Curie: Jointly with her husband, Irène was awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry of 1935 for their discovery of artificial radioactivity. This made the Curies the family with most Nobel laureates to date
Luisa Diogo: Prime Minister of Mozambique
Gertrude Elion: An American biochemist and pharmacologist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, together with Hitchings and Sir James Black
Dianne Feinstein: Senior U.S. Senator
Doris Fisher: Member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom
Louise Fréchette: United Nations Deputy Secretary-General, Centre for International Governance Innovation
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Associate Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court
Whoopi Goldberg: Won an Academy award, a Tony, an Emmy, a Grammy and a Golden Globe
Tarja Halonen: President of Finland
Salma Hayek: Academy Award-nominated Mexican actress, Daytime Emmy-winning director, and a film and television producer
Fumiko Hayashi: CEO of Daiei, President of BMW Tokyo
Susan Desmond-Hellman: HBA Woman of the Year, Head of product development at Genentech
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin: British founder of protein crystallography. She pioneered the technique of X-ray crystallography, a method used to determine the three dimensional structures of biomolecules. Among her most influential discoveries are the determination of the structure of penicillin, insulin, and vitamin B12 for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 1969, after 35 years of work, Hodgkin was able to decipher the structure of insulin. She is regarded as one of the foremost scientists in the field of X-Ray crystallography studies of natural molecules.
Rear Admiral Grace Hopper: Developed the first compiler for a computer programming language
Karen Elliott House: Won a Pulitzer Prize, Publisher of the Wall Street Journal
Lynne Greer Jolitz: Founder and Chief Technology Officer of ExecProducer a pioneer of Massive Video Production, and realtime Internet video production and deployment
Susanne Klatten: German billionaire
Neelie Kroes: European Commissioner for Competition
Chandrika Kumaratunga: President of Sri Lanka
Aung San Suu Kyi: awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her peaceful and non-violent struggle under a repressive military dictatorship (Myanmar/Burma)
Christine Lagarde: Trade Minister of France
Ada Lovelace: Analyst, Metaphysician, and Founder of Scientific Computing
Shannon Lucid: Awarded the Congressional Space Medal of Honor
Mary Ma: Chief Financial Officer of Lenovo
Wangari Maathai: Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace
Maria Goeppert Mayer: Received the 1963 Nobel Prize in Physics for proposing the nuclear shell model of the atomic nucleus, becoming one of the two women to receive a Nobel Prize in Physics (the other being Marie Curie)
Marissa Mayer: Vice President of Search Product and User Experience at Google
Mary McAleese: President of Ireland
Barbara McClintock: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine awarded to her in 1983 for the discovery of genetic transposition; to date, she has been the first and only woman to receive an unshared Nobel Prize in that category
Angela Merkel: Chancellor of Germany
Rita Levi-Montalcini: An Italian neurologist who, together with colleague Stanley Cohen, received the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of growth factors. Today she is the oldest living Nobel laureate
Ann Moore: CEO Time Inc.
Sandra Day O’Connor: Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court
Lubna Olayan: CEO and chairperson of the Olayan Financing Company (Saudi Arabia), spokesperson for women’s rights in the Middle East
Judy Olian: Dean of UCLA Anderson School of Management and is the John E. Anderson Chair in Management
Rosa Parkes: Mother of the Modern-Day Civil Rights Movement
Natalie Portman: Golden Globe-winning, Academy Award-nominated Israeli-American actress
Penny Pritzker: Chairman of the board, Classic Residence by Hyatt and TransUnion; billionaire
Xie Qihua: Chairman, president, Shanghai Baosteel
Queen Elizabeth II: Queen of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, and Saint Kitts and Nevis
Queen Rania: Queen of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan
Condoleezza Rice: United States Secretary of State
Joanne Rowling: Author of the Harry Potter books
Soraida Salwala: Created the world’s first elephant hospital
Sheryl Sandberg: Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google
Olympia J. Snowe: Senior United States Senator from Maine
Joan Steitz: RNA Society Lifetime Achievement Award, National Medal of Science, a molecular biologist at Yale University, famed for her discoveries involving RNA, including ground-breaking insights such as that ribosomes interact with mRNA by complementary base pairing and that introns are spliced by snRNPs, small nuclear ribonucleoproteins which occur in eukaryotes (such as yeasts and humans) –
Bertha von Suttner: Austrian novelist, radical pacifist, and was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize
Yulia Tymoshenko: Prime Minister of Ukraine
Vaira Vike-Freiberga: President of Latvia
Meg Whitman: President and CEO of eBay
Christiane Nusslein-Volhard: German biologist, who together with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for their research on the genetic control of embryonic development
Oprah Winfrey: the richest African American of the 20th century, the most philanthropic African American of all time, the world’s only Black billionaire for three straight years, most influential woman in the world
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow: Co-winner of the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her development of the radioimmunoassay (RIA) technique
Wu Yi: China Vice-Premier
Khaleda Zia: Prime Minister of Bangladesh
Maria Zuber: the E. A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she also leads the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences. Zuber has been involved in more than half a dozen NASA planetary missions aimed at mapping the Moon, Mars, Mercury, and several asteroids.

This list is not about why these women are more important than Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan, it’s about the imbalance in the mainstream media coverage of women. Why is there more coverage of celebrities than science? Why are there more “news” stories about makeup than medicine? Where are the older women newsreaders? Why are ratings more important than reality? Why are “women’s magazines” dumbing down? Aren’t they dumb enough already? For International Women’s Day 2007, I’d like to see the mainstream media make an effort to produce content of substance.