Honouring ignored women of STEAM.

What this site is

Unseen Genius is a non-profit project with one job: to make it harder to forget. I research women whose work changed the world and whose names did not travel with it, and I publish what I find — the discovery, the mechanism of the erasure, and the sources, so you can check me.

How I choose

Every woman here meets three tests. Her work had to be genuinely significant — a discovery, an invention or a body of work the field still uses. The credit had to go somewhere else, or nowhere: to a supervisor, a spouse, a colleague, a company, or simply into the dark. And the record has to be checkable, so that what I publish can be verified rather than merely admired.

The “A” in STEAM matters to me. A painter who invented abstraction and a couturier who dressed a First Lady without credit belong in the same conversation as a physicist and a cartographer, because the pattern that erased them is the same pattern.

How I research

Each profile is built from published, citable sources — peer-reviewed papers where they exist, archive material, museum and university records, and primary documents such as patents and original journal articles. Every profile ends with its sources. Where a well-known story is disputed or uncertain, I say so rather than smoothing it over. Where no photograph of a woman survives — as with Eunice Newton Foote — I say that too, and show her work instead.

A note on the images

Every portrait on this site is in the public domain or published under a Creative Commons licence, with the photographer, holding institution and licence recorded on the credits page. Two of the women here have no freely licensed photograph at all, which is its own kind of evidence.

Help me

Learn one of these names. Tell someone it. Send a profile to a student. If you know of a woman who belongs here, or you spot something I have got wrong, I want to hear about it — being corrected is the whole point of publishing sources.