Women’s History Month celebrates the contributions of women to history and society. Women have a strong presence in healthcare, comprising over 60% of employees entering the healthcare industry, according to a Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey & Company. Although the report notes several advantages in healthcare, one area needing improvement is the number of women in senior leadership positions in healthcare, particularly women of color. 

Here’s a look at some of the women across history who have found success in caring for the health of others:

In 1849, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in the U.S. to receive an MD degree, which she pursued after a friend confided to her she believed she would have received better care from a female physician. Her dream wasn’t easily achieved, considering she was turned away by more than 10 medical schools. After receiving her degree, Blackwell struggled to find work but co-founded the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, which served the poor. 

Dr. Jane Hinton was one of the first two Black women to earn a degree as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. She is known for developing the Mueller-Hinton agar with John Howard Mueller. The agar was developed to isolate a bacteria and has become one of the standard methods used to test bacterial resistance to antibiotics. 

Molecular biologist and virologist Flossie Wong-Staal, Ph.D., was the first scientist to clone HIV. She and her team identified HIV as the cause of AIDS. Two years later, she cloned and genetically mapped the entire virus, both crucial steps in developing HIV tests that screen donated blood and test people. 

Physical therapist Lynda Woodruff is credited with adding diversity and inclusion initiatives to the profession of physical therapy. She was the first African American to join the PT faculty in the School of Medicine at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1974. Before her death in 2018, she was instrumental in the creation of the Minority Scholarship Fund and the American Physical Therapy Association’s original Advisory Council on Minority Affairs. (In 2020, The Physical Therapy Learning Institute developed the Lynda D. Woodruff Lecture on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in Physical Therapy and Greg Hicks, director of the CTR-ACCEL program, gave the inaugural address. Get details here.)  

Mary Breckinridge is considered the driving force behind rural healthcare in the United States and the development of nurse midwives. In 1925, Breckinridge established the Frontier Nursing Service (FNS) to provide professional nursing care to residents of Appalachian Kentucky, one of the poorest and most medically underserved areas in the country.

Doris Calloway was a pioneering nutritional scientist who was the first person to study the dietary needs of healthy people under controlled conditions. She started the "Penthouse" studies, which recorded in detail the food and energy needs of six volunteers who lived for several weeks on campus in an isolated environment. These studies the 1960s later became a model for careful dietary research.

Sara Mae Stinchfield Hawk was the first Ph.D. in the United States in the field of speech pathology. She was one of the 25 people who founded the American Speech and Hearing Association in 1925, later serving as ASHA secretary and in other committee leadership positions.