Florence Bascom had to take classes for her geology PhD behind a screen so that she wouldn’t “distract” her male classmates. Maria Goeppert-Mayer didn’t have a full-time paid job as an academic physicist until 1960 – three years before she won the Nobel prize. And when Patricia Bath became the first female faculty member in the ophthalmology school at the University of California, Los Angeles, her peers tried to assign her an office next to where the lab animals were kept (she refused it, moved to Europe and later invented a device that removes cataracts). Their stories – and those of 47 other notable women – are told in Rachel Ignotofsky’s richly illustrated book Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World.

Ignotofsky’s choice of women to profile is admirably diverse, with a significant number of African-American women in the list and famous names such as Ada Lovelace and (of course) Marie Curie sharing space with less well-known figures. Each profile is dotted with anecdotes and quotations, including this gem from engineer and suffragette Hertha Ayrton: “An error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat.” The truth of Ayrton’s words is frequently apparent in other profiles. Rosalind Franklin is perhaps the most famous example of a woman whose scientific contributions were downplayed in her lifetime, but she was certainly not alone. Other once-overlooked figures include the geneticist Nettie Stevens, who identified the XY chromosome as male; the chemist Alice Ball, who developed an early treatment for leprosy; and the microbiologist Esther Lederberg, whose husband and lab partner failed to thank her in his Nobel prize speech even though they had done the prize-winning work together. (They soon divorced.)

The biochemist Gerty Cori was more fortunate: she and her husband Carl shared the 1947 Nobel Prize in Medicine after a career in which he refused to work at institutions that wouldn’t allow her to join him. After illness sapped her strength, he carried her around their laboratory so they could continue working together (how romantic!). But while supportive mentors, parents and spouses get their due, the real glory in Ignotofsky’s book belongs to the female scientists who, as she puts it “in the face of ‘No’ said ‘Try and stop me’ ”

• 2016 Ten Speed Press £13.99/$16.99hb 1288pp