This is a timeline of women in science in the United States.

• 1848: Maria Mitchell became the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; she had discovered a new comet the year before.^[1]
• 1853: Jane Colden was the only female biologist mentioned by Carl Linnaeus in his masterwork Species Plantarum.^[2]
• 1889: Mary Emilie Holmes became the first female Fellow of the Geological Society of America.^[3]
• 1889: Susan La Flesche Picotte became the first Native American woman to become a physician in the United States.^[4][5]
• 1893: Florence Bascom became the second woman to earn her Ph.D. in geology in the United States, and the first woman to receive a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.^[6][7] Geologists consider her to be the "first woman geologist in this country [America]."^[8]
• 1896: Florence Bascom became the first woman to work for the United States Geological Survey.^[9][10]

• 1901: Florence Bascom became the first female geologist to present a paper before the Geological Survey of Washington.^[11]
• 1903: Marie Curie became the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, awarded in Physics, and went on to also win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She performed pioneering research in radioactivity, and discovered two elements (polonium and radium).^[12]
• 1912: Henrietta Swan Leavitt studied the bright-dim cycle periods of Cepheid stars, then found a way to calculate the distance from such stars to Earth.^[13]
• 1924: Florence Bascom became the first woman elected to the Council of the Geological Society of America.^[11]
• 1925: Florence Sabin became the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences.^[14]
• 1928: Alice Evans became the first woman elected president of the Society of American Bacteriologists.^[15]
• 1936: Edith Patch became the first female president of the Entomological Society of America.^[16]