The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Female scientists who worked on A-bomb mostly absent from ‘Oppenheimer’

You wouldn’t know it from the blockbuster film, but many women were involved in the Manhattan Project during World War II

Perspective by
and 
August 10, 2023 at 7:00 a.m. EDT
Theoretical physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer shared a Nobel Prize in physics — with two men — in 1963. About 30 men with links to the Manhattan Project also won Nobels in their careers. Yet for years Goeppert Mayer struggled for acceptance in academia. (Getty Images)
6 min

Female scientists played important roles in the Manhattan Project that created the first atomic bomb during World War II. But you wouldn’t know this from the blockbuster movie, “Oppenheimer.”

There were 640 women working at Los Alamos, 11 percent of the workforce, not counting other Manhattan Project sites elsewhere in the country. Many of these women filled administrative roles, but nearly half were scientists — mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists and computational analysts.