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Books by WomenList of science-related nonfiction by women
Posted August 25, 2021 by Rainy_Nebula in Books

So... I put together a list of science-related nonfiction by women. I'm taking them being female authors at face value. It's not intended as a complete list. I excluded stuff like the "For Dummies" series, mostly limited this list to one book per author, and missed/left out plenty of stuff. A few books may have male coauthors I haven't bothered mentioning -- most don't. I think there are 84 books listed here, by 82 different authors. I've only read four. Just thought an easily-browsable list might be useful for some people (including future-me). Hope nobody minds.

HUMAN BODIES

  • Cordelia Fine, Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society
  • Colette Dowling, The Frailty Myth: Redefining the Physical Potential of Women and Girls
  • Penelope A. Lewis, The Secret World of Sleep: the Surprising Science of the Mind at Rest
  • Alice Robb, Why We Dream: The Transformative Power of Our Nightly Journey
  • Sarah E. Hill, This Is Your Brain on Birth Control: The Surprising Science of Women, Hormones, and the Law of Unintended Consequences
  • Gina Rippon, The Gendered Brain: The New Neuroscience That Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain
  • Giulia Enders, Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ
  • Alanna Collen, 10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
  • Shanna H. Swan, Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Imperiling the Future of the Human Race

MEDICINE

  • Rose George, Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood
  • Pamela Nagami, The Woman with a Worm in Her Head: And Other True Stories of Infectious Disease
  • Lisa Sanders, Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis
  • Olivia Campbell, Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine

PANDEMICS

  • Jennifer Wright, Get Well Soon: History's Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them
  • Catharine Arnold, Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History
  • Molly Caldwell Crosby, Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic that Remains One of Medicine's Greatest Mysteries
  • Molly Caldwell Crosby, The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History
  • Sonia Shah, The Fever: How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years
  • Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82
  • Marilyn Chase, The Barbary Plague: The Black Death in Victorian San Francisco
  • Helen Bynum, Spitting Blood: The History of Tuberculosis

MEDICAL SEXISM

  • Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness
  • Deirdre English and Barbara Ehrenreich, Witches, Midwives, & Nurses: A History of Women Healers
  • Maya Dusenbery, Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick
  • Gabrielle Jackson, Pain and Prejudice: A Call to Arms for Women and Their Bodies
  • Elinor Cleghorn, Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World

MEDICAL CRITICISM

  • Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present
  • Lydia Kang, Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything
  • Suzanne Humphries, Dissolving Illusions: Disease, Vaccines, and The Forgotten History
  • Sonia Shah, The Body Hunters: Testing New Drugs on the World's Poorest Patients

PSYCHOLOGY

  • Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence - From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror
  • Carol Tavris, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
  • Gillian Butler and Freda McManus, Psychology: A Very Short Introduction
  • Tasha Eurich, Insight: Why We're Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life
  • Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
  • Susan A. Gelman, The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought
  • Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain
  • Shelley E. Taylor, The Tending Instinct: Women, Men, and the Biology of Relationships

DEATH, FORENSICS AND ARCHAEOLOGY

  • Caitlin Doughty, Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals About Death
  • Sue Black, All That Remains: A Life in Death
  • Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers
  • Val McDermid, Forensics: What Bugs, Burns, Prints, DNA and More Tell Us About Crime
  • Jeannine Davis-Kimball, Warrior Women: An Archaeologist's Search for History's Hidden Heroines
  • Brenna Hassett, Built on Bones: 15,000 Years of Urban Life and Death
  • Lydia Pyne, Seven Skeletons: The Evolution of the World's Most Famous Human Fossils
  • Delta Willis, The Hominid Gang: Behind the Scenes in the Search for Human Origins

NON-HUMAN LIFE

  • Amy Stewart, Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities
  • Ruth Kassinger, Slime: How Algae Created Us, Plague Us, and Just Might Save Us
  • Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, Buzz, Sting, Bite: Why We Need Insects
  • Susanne Foitzik, Empire of Ants: The Hidden World and Extraordinary Lives of Earth's Tiny Conquerors
  • Danna Staaf, Monarchs of the Sea: The Extraordinary 500-Million-Year History of Cephalopods
  • Sy Montgomery, The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness
  • Jane Goodall, In the Shadow of Man
  • Lynn Margulis, Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution
  • Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist
  • Biruté M.F. Galdikas, Reflections of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans of Borneo

PHYSICS

  • Helen Czerski, Storm in a Teacup: The Physics of Everyday Life
  • Lisa Randall, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe
  • Sabine Hossenfelder, Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray
  • Alanna Mitchell, The Spinning Magnet: The Force That Created the Modern World--and Could Destroy It

SPACE

  • Dava Sobel, The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars
  • Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race
  • Andrea Wulf, Chasing Venus: The Race to Measure the Heavens
  • Carrie Nugent, Asteroid Hunters
  • Maggie Aderin-Pocock, The Book of the Moon: A Guide to Our Closest Neighbor
  • Nicky Jenner, 4th Rock from the Sun: The Story of Mars
  • Elizabeth Tasker, The Planet Factory: Exoplanets and the Search for a Second Earth
  • Emma Chapman, First Light: Switching on Stars at the Dawn of Time
  • Sarah Stewart Johnson, The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World
  • Lisa Harvey-Smith, The Secret Life of Stars: Astrophysics for Everyone
  • Katie Mack, The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)
  • Katia Moskvitch, Neutron Stars: The Quest to Understand the Zombies of the Cosmos

COMPUTERS

  • Claire L. Evans, Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet
  • Janelle Shane, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place

MATH AND DATA

  • Eugenia Cheng, How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics
  • Vicky Neale, Closing the Gap: The Quest to Understand Prime Numbers
  • Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy
  • Caroline Criado Pérez, Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men

TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS

  • Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave
  • Kelly Weinersmith, Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve and/or Ruin Everything
  • Katrine Marçal, Mother of Invention: How Good Ideas Get Ignored in an Economy Built for Men

MISCELLANEOUS BIOGRAPHIES

  • Georgina Ferry, Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life
  • Sam Maggs, Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers Who Changed History
  • Joyce Sidman, The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian's Art Changed Science
  • Lauren Redniss, Radioactive: Marie and Pierre Curie, A Tale of Love and Fallout
  • Kate Moore, The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women
  • Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
  • Sarah Scoles, Making Contact: Jill Tarter and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

MISCELLANEOUS

  • Katherine Ashenburg, The Dirt on Clean: An Unsanitized History
  • Florence Williams, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative
  • Jennifer Coates, Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of Gender Differences in Language
  • Mary Caperton Morton, Aerial Geology: A High-Altitude Tour of North America's Spectacular Volcanoes, Canyons, Glaciers, Lakes, Craters, and Peaks
  • Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour
  • Cathy Cobb, The Joy of Chemistry: The Amazing Science of Familiar Things
  • Maryn McKenna, Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats
  • Erika Engelhaupt, Gory Details: Adventures from the Dark Side of Science
  • Patricia Fara, A Lab of One's Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War
  • Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
  • Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
  • Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
  • Jennifer A. Doudna, A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution
  • Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

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