Five things invented by women

[00:00.41] Here’s a simple challenge: name a famous inventor.

[00:04.39] Perhaps Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci springs to mind.

[00:08.37] Or the pioneer of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell.

[00:11.83] But you might be hard-pressed to name many female inventors, even though women are behind some of the most widely used technologies in the modern world.

[00:20.86] For example, where would we be without the windscreen wiper? Back on a freezing winter’s day in 1902, Mary Anderson was travelling by tram through New York city.

[00:31.75] Snow was falling, forcing the driver to stop repeatedly and get out to clear it.

[00:37.06] Each time the door opened, Mary suffered a gust of sub-zero air.

[00:41.84] She had a brainwave: why not make some kind of a rubber blade that could be operated from inside the vehicle?

[00:48.75] And that’s exactly what she did.

[00:50.88] Let’s step in from freezing New York for our next invention.

[00:54.59] The dishwasher dates back even earlier to the 19th Century, and to the dinner parties thrown by a lady called Josephine Cochrane.

[01:02.83] As a frequent host, she wanted a machine that could wash dishes faster than people.

[01:07.08] Her response was to develop what was to become the first commercially successful dishwasher.

[01:12.66] Interestingly, innovation was in her blood: her grandfather had invented the steamboat.

[01:18.50] Need something to do while the dishwasher is whirring away?

[01:21.69] How about a round of Monopoly?

[01:23.81] One of the most popular board games around, the rules were first drawn up by a lady called Elizabeth Magie, and patented in 1904.

[01:32.84] Her intention was to create a game to highlight what she saw as the pitfalls of capitalism.

[01:38.15] It was originally called The Landlord’s Game.

[01:41.61] To an altogether different kind of innovation: Kevlar is the lightweight fibre used in bulletproof vests.

[01:48.78] The material is used by millions every day and has saved countless lives.

[01:53.56] The super tough fabric is also used in objects ranging from gloves to aeroplanes to wind turbines.

[02:00.47] Incredibly, its strength-to-weight ratio is five times higher than steel.

[02:04.98] Again, it was invented by a woman, the American chemist Stephanie Kwolek, in 1964.

[02:12.15] Finally, one of the most important inventions of the 20th Century must surely be the computer programme.

[02:18.26] The world of programming is notoriously unbalanced in terms of gender.

[02:23.04] Men vastly outnumber women, and take home around 30% more pay than their female counterparts on average.

[02:28.89] But back in the 1940s and 50s, women were at the forefront of this new field.

[02:34.20] Grace Hopper is credited with inventing the first compiler in 1952, which serves as the bridge between code and the binary ones and zeros understood by computers.