Women's Names for the Eiffel Tower: The 72 Women Scientists and the History Behind the List

Around the first level of the Eiffel Tower, in large gold letters, run the names of 72 French scientists, engineers and mathematicians. Gustave Eiffel put them there in 1889 as a tribute to science. All 72 are men.

In 2025 the City of Paris, the company that runs the tower and the French association Femmes & Sciences began a project to put that right. A commission recommended adding 72 women scientists beside the 72 men, and in January 2026 Femmes & Sciences published its proposed list. The names are meant to be inscribed on a new band just above the original frieze, pending approval by the Mayor of Paris, three French academies and the women's heirs.

This article explains the history behind the list: why the tower carries names at all, why no women were included in 1889, how the new project came about, how the 72 women were chosen, and who they are. It includes the full proposed list in a table, with short descriptions, and profiles of some of the women whose stories best explain why the list matters.

The tower and its "invocation of science"

Building the tower

The Eiffel Tower was built for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, the world's fair held in Paris to mark the centenary of the French Revolution. Construction began on 28 January 1887 and was completed on 31 March 1889; the tower opened to the public on 15 May 1889. The design came from two engineers at Gustave Eiffel's company, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, with the architect Stephen Sauvestre adding decorative arches and other embellishments. The tower stands 300 metres tall, reaching 330 metres with today's antennas. Its 18,038 wrought-iron pieces were joined with 2.5 million rivets.

The tower was controversial before it was finished. On 14 February 1887 the newspaper Le Temps published a petition titled "Artists against the Eiffel Tower," backed by a "Committee of Three Hundred" led by the architect Charles Garnier and including the writer Guy de Maupassant and the composers Charles Gounod and Jules Massenet. Eiffel's concession, signed on 8 January 1887, gave him the commercial income from the tower during the exhibition and for 20 years afterwards, and the tower was originally due to be dismantled in 1909. It survived largely because it proved scientifically useful, especially for radio: it became part of the International Time Service in 1910, and during the First World War a transmitter there was used to disrupt German radio communications.

Why Eiffel inscribed scientists' names

Faced with the artists' protest, Eiffel set out to present his tower as a monument to science and engineering rather than an eyesore. On 20 February 1889, in a speech to the Société centrale du Travail professionnel, he explained his plan. In translation, he said: "To express in a striking way that the monument I am raising will be placed under the invocation of Science, I have decided to inscribe in gold letters on the great frieze of the first floor, in the place of honour, the names of the greatest scholars who have honoured France from 1789 to the present day."

The result was a frieze of 72 names, in letters about 60 centimetres (24 inches) tall, placed on the sides of the tower beneath the first balcony. There are 18 names on each of the four sides, which face the Trocadéro, the École Militaire, the Grenelle district and the La Bourdonnais avenue. The names include some of the most famous figures in the history of mathematics and physics: Lagrange, Laplace, Fourier, Ampère, Fresnel and Cauchy among them. Fourteen of the names are those of leading French hydraulic engineers, though some important figures in that field, such as Darcy, Chézy and Boussinesq, were left out.

The letters were originally gilded. They were painted over in the early twentieth century, restored in 1986 and 1987, and returned to their original gold during the repainting of 2010 and 2011. The president of the tower's operating company, Jean-François Martins, writing in the 2026 booklet that presents the women's list, describes the 72 men as having returned "after a few decades of oblivion" and now standing as "a timeless but incomplete tribute" to French knowledge and genius.

Why no women were named in 1889

Women and French science in the nineteenth century

Eiffel's frieze covered the century from 1789 to 1889. During that period, French women were largely excluded from the institutions that produced and recognised scientific work. The introduction to the 2026 booklet notes that in Eiffel's time women had only just been allowed to apply to universities and engineering schools. Few women could build the kind of public scientific career that would have put their names in front of Eiffel and his advisers.

Even so, there were women whose work was important, and one name stands out.

Sophie Germain, "the forgotten woman of the Eiffel Tower"

Sophie Germain (1776–1831) was a Parisian mathematician who taught herself from her father's library, learning Latin and Greek so that she could read Newton and Euler. When the École Polytechnique opened in 1794 she could not enrol, so she obtained its lecture notes and sent work to the mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange under a man's name, "M. Le Blanc." Lagrange discovered who she was and became her mentor. From 1804 she corresponded, under the same pseudonym, with Carl Friedrich Gauss, who praised her when she revealed her identity, though the two never met.

Germain made lasting contributions to number theory, including a result now called Sophie Germain's theorem, which proves one case of Fermat's Last Theorem for certain prime exponents. Primes p for which 2p + 1 is also prime are still called Sophie Germain primes. Her most relevant work for the tower, though, was on elasticity: the mathematics of how surfaces and materials bend and vibrate. She became the first woman to win a prize from the Paris Academy of Sciences for her work on vibrating elastic surfaces. Wikipedia dates the prize to 1816; the Femmes & Sciences booklet says 1815, the year of the competition.

That work on elasticity became part of the foundation of the theory of how materials resist stress, which is central to engineering structures like the tower. Her absence from the frieze was noticed early. Wikipedia records that in 1913 the writer John Augustine Zahm suggested she had been excluded because she was a woman. The Femmes & Sciences booklet quotes the American author H. J. Mozans (a pen name used by Zahm), whose book Woman in Science observed that when the tower was erected, the names of 72 scholars were inscribed on it, but that the list did not include "this woman of genius, whose researches have contributed so much to establishing the theory of the elasticity of metals: Sophie Germain." The booklet dates that book to 1918. Either way, the omission had been pointed out within about a generation of the tower's completion, and the booklet says Germain came to be called "l'oubliée de la tour Eiffel," the forgotten woman of the Eiffel Tower.

A final detail captures her situation. When Germain died in 1831, her death certificate described her not as a mathematician or scientist but as a rentière, a woman living on private income.

The Matilda effect

The pattern that the new list sets out to address has a name. The Matilda effect describes the way women's scientific achievements go unrecognised or are credited to men. The American suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage described the pattern in an 1870 essay, "Woman as Inventor," and the historian of science Margaret W. Rossiter coined the term in 1993, deliberately echoing the "Matthew effect" named by the sociologist Robert K. Merton in 1968, which describes how eminent scientists receive more credit than less well-known colleagues for similar work.

The introduction to the Femmes & Sciences booklet explicitly frames the project around the Matilda effect, and several of the women on the list are classic examples of it, including Rosalind Franklin and Marthe Gautier.

How the new list came about

A student idea: "The 40 sisters of Hypatia"

According to the Femmes & Sciences booklet, the project's roots go back to 2021, when a group of students from the Défi Sorbonne program at Sorbonne University, led by Benjamin Rigaud, contacted Femmes & Sciences. They proposed "Les 40 sœurs d'Hypatie" ("The 40 sisters of Hypatia"), a project to highlight 40 women scientists who had shaped history but were often unknown to the public, whose names might be placed in 40 niches on the tower's second level. (Hypatia of Alexandria was an ancient mathematician and philosopher, often cited as one of the first women scientists whose names are known.)

Femmes & Sciences, an association founded in 2000 to promote the visibility and recognition of women scientists, took up the idea. The booklet says that for more than four years the association worked on the project under the responsibility of the astrophysicist Isabelle Vauglin, its vice-president.

The 2025 commission

The project became official on 26 March 2025, when the Mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, appointed a commission of experts to study the feasibility of inscribing women scientists' names on the tower. Sortiraparis, a Paris news site, describes the City of Paris, the tower's operating company (the Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, or SETE) and Femmes & Sciences as having launched the project together in March 2025.

The commission was co-chaired by Isabelle Vauglin and Jean-François Martins, president of SETE. According to the booklet it had 15 members drawn from three areas of expertise: the history of the Eiffel Tower, heritage and culture, and the history and sociology of women in science. Its members included:

The presence of heritage architects and historic-monument officials matters. The Eiffel Tower is a protected historic monument, and any change to its appearance has to respect that status. In her foreword to the booklet, Hidalgo writes that she convened the commission "to reconcile strict respect for our heritage with the universal vocation of our city," bringing together heritage experts, historians and scientists to reach a consensus.

On 5 September 2025, according to the booklet, the commission's report was validated. It favoured the first level of the tower as the location, which offered room for 72 names, matching the original frieze "for perfect equality," in Hidalgo's words. Femmes & Sciences was given the task of assembling the list by the end of 2025.

Building the list

Femmes & Sciences collected suggestions from French research bodies, learned societies and individuals. The booklet thanks a long list of contributors, including the Académie des sciences, the Académie des technologies, the CNRS and many of its institutes, the Institut Pasteur, the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), engineering schools such as the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne and the École nationale supérieure d'arts et métiers, and associations of women engineers, mathematicians and computer scientists. Members of the public suggested names too.

The booklet was written by a team of twelve women scientists led by Vauglin, including chemists, physicists, biologists, a mathematician, an engineer, a computer scientist and a neurobiologist.

The announcement

On Monday 26 January 2026, Anne Hidalgo announced that 72 women scientists would have their names inscribed on the tower. According to Sortiraparis, the names are to go on a strip just above the existing frieze on the first level. Hidalgo was quoted as saying "It's time to restore the recognition women deserve on the Eiffel Tower," and describing the tower as a tribute to science and scientists.

How the 72 were chosen

The commission and Femmes & Sciences applied two overlapping sets of criteria.

The commission's rules

According to the booklet's acknowledgements, the commission set these criteria for the final list:

1. Period and standing. Candidates had to be eminent women experts who lived "between 1789 and today," who have died, and whose work their peers consider foundational and decisive. The 1789 start date mirrors Eiffel's own rule for the men.
2. Balance. The list had to give balanced representation across the fundamental sciences: mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, computer science, earth sciences, and ecology and environment.
3. Nationality. The women were to be chosen mainly from among French nationals and women who had brought honour to France.
4. Name length. A name could not be longer than 12 letters, so it would fit the space available.

Femmes & Sciences' own aims

The association added its own principles, set out in the booklet's introduction:

• A wide historical span, to show that women have contributed to knowledge for a long time. The list covers almost 250 years, from Angélique du Coudray, a pioneer of obstetrics born in 1712, to scientists who died in recent years.
• Pioneers first, favouring women whose persistence opened doors in a world that was mostly male and often hostile.
• Six scientific fields, with representative women from each: physics, chemistry, mathematics and computer science, earth sciences, biology and medicine, and engineering.

Who was left out, and why

Every set of rules excludes someone. The Wikipedia article on the list notes some notable cases:

The rule that the women must have lived after 1789 explains a curiosity on the list: Angélique du Coudray, born in 1712, qualifies because she was still alive in 1789 (she died in 1794).

The 12-letter rule and inscribed names

The 12-letter limit means that some women appear on the list under a shortened form of their name. In the booklet's table of contents, for example, the mathematical physicist Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat is listed as Yvonne Bruhat, the astrophysicist Lydie Koch-Miramond as Lydie Koch, the physician Nicole Girard-Mangin as Nicole Mangin, the physicist Cécile DeWitt-Morette as Cécile Morette, the computer scientist Rose Dieng-Kuntz as Rose Dieng, and the naturalist Jeanne Villepreux-Power as Jeanne Villepreux. The chemical engineer the English Wikipedia list calls Anne-Marcelle Kahn appears in the booklet under her birth name, Anne-Marcelle Schrameck; she married the naval engineer Louis Kahn in 1922.

This mirrors the original frieze, where the men are identified by surname alone.

Not final yet

The booklet presents its alphabetical list as "proposed by Femmes & Sciences subject to final acceptance by the Mayor of Paris, the Academies of Sciences, Technologies and Medicine, and the rights holders." As of early 2026, the list was awaiting that approval. The booklet's appendix of birth and death places also includes two names, Huguette Delavault and Lucienne Félix, that are not among its 72 profiles, a reminder that the list was assembled quickly and was still provisional.

The proposed list of 72

The table below follows the order of the Femmes & Sciences booklet and uses the name form shown there, with the fuller name where it differs. Dates are those given in the booklet's appendix; where English Wikipedia gives different dates, the booklet's are used and a note is added below the table. Descriptions are condensed from the booklet and the Wikipedia list.

Notes on dates. English Wikipedia's list differs from the booklet for several women: it gives Jeanne Baret's death as 1887 (the booklet gives 1807; Baret was born in 1740, so 1887 is evidently an error), Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat's death as 2021 (the booklet gives 2025), Marthe Condat's death as 1939 (booklet 1936), Louise du Pierry's death as 1807 (booklet 1830), Angélique du Coudray's birth as 1714 (booklet 1712), Yvonne Odic's death as 1983 (booklet 1982), Lucie Randoin's birth as 1888 (booklet 1885), Yolande Le Calvez's death as 2001 (booklet 2002) and Agnès Ullmann's birth as 1928 (booklet 1927). For Geneviève Jourdain, the dates above are Wikipedia's; the booklet's appendix lists a "Hélène Jourdain" with the dates 1946–2007, an inconsistency that may be corrected in a final version.

What the list shows

A spread across fields

The booklet assigns each woman to one of six broad fields: physics, chemistry, mathematics and computer science, earth sciences, biology and medicine, and engineering. Chemistry and physics appear to be the most heavily represented, reflecting both the strength of French research in those areas and the number of women who made careers there in the twentieth century, often through the CNRS, the Institut Pasteur, the Institut du radium and the universities.

A spread across time

The earliest-born woman on the list is Angélique du Coudray (1712), the latest-born Isabelle Olivieri (1957). Most of the women were born in the late nineteenth or twentieth centuries, which reflects history: it was only from the late nineteenth century that French women could routinely enter universities, earn doctorates and hold research posts.

A spread across origins

Although the criteria called mainly for French nationals or women who honoured France, the booklet's appendix shows many birthplaces outside France: Marie Curie in Warsaw, Augusta Déjérine and Dorothea Klumpke in San Francisco, Radhia Cousot in Tunisia, Rose Dieng in Dakar, Senegal, Alice Recoque in Algeria, Ethel Moustacchi in Cairo, Agnès Ullmann in Romania, Bianca Tchoubar and Hélène Sparrow in Ukraine, Nathalie Demassieux and Marianne Grunberg-Manago in Russia, Cornélie Lebon in Ypres, Belgium, Toshiko Yuasa in Tokyo and Rosalind Franklin in London. French science, like the original 1889 list, has always drawn on people from many places.

Selected stories

The table can only give a line for each woman. A few of their stories, drawn from the booklet and related sources, show why Femmes & Sciences chose them and what they reveal about women in science.

Marie Curie and her laboratory

Marie Curie (1867–1934) is the best-known name on the list, and the only one many visitors will recognise immediately. Born in Warsaw, she worked in Paris on radioactivity and won two Nobel Prizes. The list also shows her influence on others. Her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956), shared a Nobel Prize for the discovery of artificial radioactivity. Marguerite Perey (1909–1975), from a modest background, earned a state chemistry diploma in 1929 and joined the Institut du radium as Curie's assistant. Specialising in the radioactive element actinium, she discovered francium in 1939, using tools developed by another woman on the list, Yvette Cauchois. Perey later became, in 1949, holder of the chair of nuclear chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, and from 1950 to 1963 she sat on the international Commission on Atomic Weights. Toshiko Yuasa (1909–1980), described in the booklet as Japan's first woman physicist, worked in 1940 under Frédéric Joliot-Curie at the Collège de France, defended her state doctorate in 1943, joined the CNRS at Orsay in 1949, and in 1955 warned of the dangers of nuclear tests at Bikini Atoll. A prize in her name has supported young women scientists studying in France since 2002.

Rosalind Franklin, the exception

Rosalind Franklin (1920–1958) was British, which is why her inclusion was treated as an exception to the French-association criterion. The booklet explains her French connection. After earning her doctorate at Cambridge in 1945, she worked from 1947 to 1950 in Paris, holding a CNRS research post at the Laboratoire central des services chimiques de l'État, where she learned the X-ray diffraction techniques she used to study the structure of carbon. In 1951 she joined King's College London and applied those techniques to DNA. With her student R. Gosling she made X-ray images, including the famous "Photo 51," which were shown without her knowledge by Maurice Wilkins to James Watson and proved decisive in identifying the double-helix structure. Franklin died at 37, and her role was overlooked in her lifetime and in the 1962 Nobel Prize. The booklet notes that the European Space Agency's ExoMars rover, due to launch in 2028, bears her name.

Marthe Gautier and the extra chromosome

Marthe Gautier (1925–2022) is a textbook case of the Matilda effect. Born into a farming family, she became a physician and later a research director at INSERM. Using cell-culture techniques she had learned during a postdoctoral stay at Harvard, she showed in 1958, in Raymond Turpin's laboratory at the Hôpital Trousseau, that children with Down syndrome carry an extra chromosome. It was the first demonstration that a chromosome abnormality could cause a human condition. Yet in the official publication, in the Comptes rendus of the Académie des sciences on 26 January 1959, her name was pushed into the background. Her role was eventually recognised; she received the Legion of Honour in 2014, and in 2025 an asteroid was named after her.

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat and the equations of general relativity

Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat (1923–2025), who will appear on the tower as Yvonne Bruhat, earned her doctorate in 1951 and produced the first rigorous results on solutions of Einstein's equations of general relativity, opening the way to the mathematical study of space-time. The booklet credits her with demonstrating the physical reality of gravitational waves, later confirmed experimentally. She received the CNRS silver medal in 1958 and became, in 1979, the first woman elected to the Académie des sciences. She died in 2025, shortly before the list was published.

Pioneers of medicine

Several women on the list were the first to break into French medicine. Madeleine Brès (1842–1921) was the first French woman to earn a medical degree. Marthe Condat became the first French woman professor of medicine. Nicole Girard-Mangin (1878–1919) was the first woman doctor to serve with the French Army. Suzanne Noël (1878–1954), a pioneer of cosmetic and reconstructive surgery, treated the gueules cassées, soldiers with severe facial wounds from the First World War, developed techniques such as the facelift, and during the Second World War operated on members of the Resistance and on Jews to alter their appearance and protect them.

The list reaches further back with Angélique du Coudray (born 1712), a midwife who became a pioneer of obstetric teaching.

Explorers and naturalists

Jeanne Baret (1740–1807) is one of the most adventurous figures on the list. In 1767 the naturalist Commerson, with whom she worked, was to sail with Bougainville aboard La Boudeuse on a round-the-world voyage to collect new species of plants, insects and birds. Because women were not allowed on board, Baret disguised herself as a man and signed on as a sailor. Commerson died during the voyage and left her his collections. Back in France in 1774, she worked on classifying them, and King Louis XVI granted her a lifetime pension for her skills as a botanist. Two plants bear her name, Baretia bonnafidia and Solanum baretiae.

Jeanne Villepreux-Power (1794–1871) invented glass cages for observing marine animals in their environment, called "cages à la Power," which the booklet describes as ancestors of the aquarium, some twenty years ahead of the first English aquaria. With them she studied the argonaut, a cephalopod mollusc then the subject of speculation by European academies, and showed that the female secretes its own shell. She became the first woman member of the Academy of Sciences of Catania and a correspondent of 17 learned societies.

Anita Conti (1899–1997) is described as France's first woman oceanographer.

Engineers

The list deliberately includes engineers, a field where, according to the booklet, only a quarter of French engineering degrees are awarded to women even today. Anne-Marcelle Schrameck (1896–1965) entered the École des Mines de Saint-Étienne in 1917 and graduated in 1919, becoming the first woman to graduate from one of France's elite grandes écoles of engineering; the school then closed its doors to women until 1970. In 1920 she was hired by the Kuhlmann chemical works in Lorraine, where she went 700 metres underground to supervise operations in the salt mines. Marie-Louise Paris (1889–1969) founded the engineering school that became EPF, originally a school for women engineers. Jeanne Guiot (1889–1963) became an engineer in 1917 at the Compagnie des Forges et Aciéries de la Marine, working on energetics, thermodynamics and blast furnaces. Yvonne Odic (1890–1982) developed special steels at one of Paris's largest war factories. Sébastienne Guyot and Andrée Hoppilliard worked in aeronautics.

Computing

The list also honours women in computing. Alice Recoque (1929–2021), an ESPCI graduate and specialist in computer architecture, led the project for the Mitra 15 minicomputer at the French company CII, later worked at Honeywell and Bull, where from 1985 she headed an artificial-intelligence mission, and in 1978 helped create the CNIL, France's data-protection authority. Radhia Cousot (1947–2014) helped develop abstract interpretation, a mathematical approach to verifying that software behaves correctly. Rose Dieng-Kuntz (1956–2008), born in Dakar, worked on knowledge sharing and the semantic web.

Astronomy

Dorothea Klumpke (1861–1942), born in San Francisco, studied at the Sorbonne from 1877 and in 1893 became the first woman to earn a doctorate in science there, with a thesis on the rings of Saturn. Recruited by the Paris Observatory in 1887, she worked on the international Carte du Ciel star-mapping project and led the observatory's measurement bureau, directing a team of women "calculators" who measured star positions on photographic plates. Augusta Déjérine-Klumpke, also born in San Francisco, is on the list as a neuroanatomist. Edmée Chandon (1885–1944) was the first woman to have a professional career as an astronomer at the Paris Observatory, and Louise du Pierry (1746–1830) was an eighteenth-century astronomer.

Mathematics

Alongside Germain and Choquet-Bruhat, the list includes Yvette Amice (1936–1993), who founded a French school of p-adic analysis and in 1975 became president of the Société mathématique de France, only the second woman to hold that post since its creation in 1872; Marie-Louise Dubreil-Jacotin (1905–1972), the first woman full professor of mathematics in France; Jacqueline Ferrand, Paulette Libermann, Edith Mourier, Marie-Hélène Schwartz and Michelle Schatzman, whose names are attached to concepts and models still used today. The booklet notes, for example, that a 1996 model of vortex-density evolution in superconductivity carries Schatzman's name, as the Chapman-Rubinstein-Schatzman model.

Neuroscience

Denise Albe-Fessard (1916–2003) trained as a physics engineer at ESPCI in 1937 and after the Second World War moved into neurophysiology, studying electric fish. In 1953 she made the first intracellular recordings in a mammal's brain, using micro-electrodes in the cat's cerebral cortex. She went on to do fundamental work on central pain pathways, chaired the scientific committee of the first international congress on pain in 1975, and was the first president of the International Association for the Study of Pain from 1975 to 1978. She wrote more than 190 publications.

Why it matters

Visibility and role models

The booklet's introduction makes the case directly. Women remain underrepresented in some fields in France, such as theoretical physics and computer science, and only a quarter of engineering diplomas go to women. The association argues that the causes are mainly cultural, rooted in stereotypes, and that the absence of women scientists from textbooks, public spaces and the media deprives girls of role models. Restoring past women scientists to public view, it argues, gives today's girls models to follow.

Hidalgo's foreword expresses the same hope: that the list will soon allow little girls to "dream while looking up at the Eiffel Tower" and imagine themselves as mathematicians, chemists, biologists, computer scientists, engineers, physicists, doctors, astrophysicists or climatologists, while little boys will see that "science has no gender."

Symbolism

The Eiffel Tower is one of the most visited monuments in the world, running at roughly 7 million visitors a year since 2003 and receiving 5,889,000 in 2022. Few places offer a more visible stage. SETE's president, in the booklet, frames the new frieze as making the tower a symbol of equality in the twenty-first century, as it was a symbol of faith in technical progress in the nineteenth.

History done carefully

The project also illustrates a careful approach to changing a historic monument. Rather than altering the original frieze, the plan adds a new band above it, leaving Eiffel's 72 names intact. The commission included heritage architects and historic-monument officials, as well as a representative of Eiffel's descendants, and the final list depends on approval from the academies and the women's heirs. That approach treats the original as a historical document, with its omissions, while adding a correction beside it.

Limits of any list

No list of 72 can capture the full history of women in science. The booklet itself acknowledges that "choosing always means giving up," and that many remarkable women could not be included given the limited space. The criteria inevitably shaped the result: the post-1789 rule excludes earlier figures, the 12-letter rule shortened or excluded long names, and the emphasis on French connections excludes most of the world's women scientists. The list is a commemoration, not a complete history.

Common misconceptions

"The women's names have already been inscribed." As of early 2026, the list had been proposed and announced but still awaited approval by the Mayor of Paris, the Académie des sciences, the Académie des technologies, the Académie nationale de médecine and the rights holders. Sortiraparis reported that the names would be added "in the coming months."

"The original male names will be replaced." No. The plan is to add a new strip of names just above the existing frieze on the first level, alongside the original 72.

"Only French women are included." The criteria called mainly for French women or women who honoured France, but the list includes women born in many countries, and Rosalind Franklin, who was British, was included as an exception.

"Sophie Germain's omission was only noticed recently." It was remarked on in the early twentieth century, by Zahm writing as H. J. Mozans, and she was called "the forgotten woman of the Eiffel Tower."

"The list is ranked." It is alphabetical. Its order says nothing about the relative importance of the women.

"Eiffel deliberately excluded women." There is no record cited in the sources here of a decision to exclude women as such. Eiffel chose eminent scholars from 1789 to 1889, a period when women were largely shut out of the institutions that conferred that eminence. Germain is the clearest case of a woman whose work arguably deserved a place.

Frequently asked questions

How many names are on the Eiffel Tower? The original frieze has 72 names of men, 18 on each side of the tower, beneath the first balcony. The proposal adds 72 women's names, making 144.

Who chose the women? The association Femmes & Sciences, at the request of a commission appointed by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo in March 2025, using criteria set by that commission. Suggestions came from French academies, research organisations, learned societies and members of the public.

What were the selection rules? The women had to have lived between 1789 and the present and to have died; their work had to be considered foundational by their peers; the fields had to be balanced; they were chosen mainly from among French women or women who honoured France; and each name had to be no longer than 12 letters.

When was the list announced? Anne Hidalgo announced it on 26 January 2026. The Femmes & Sciences booklet presenting it was published at about the same time.

Who is the oldest woman on the list? Angélique du Coudray, a midwife and pioneer of obstetrics born in 1712, who qualifies because she was still alive after 1789.

Why is Rosalind Franklin on the list if she was British? She was included as an exception. She worked in Paris from 1947 to 1950, holding a CNRS post, where she learned the X-ray diffraction techniques she later applied to DNA.

Why do some names look different from their usual form? Because of the 12-letter limit. For example, Yvonne Choquet-Bruhat appears as Yvonne Bruhat and Lydie Koch-Miramond as Lydie Koch.

Is Marie Curie on the original frieze? No. All 72 original names are men's. Marie Curie is one of the proposed new names.

Where will the names go? On a strip just above the original frieze on the tower's first level.

The bottom line

Gustave Eiffel inscribed 72 names on his tower to show that it was built under the "invocation of Science." In doing so he recorded a century of French scientific achievement, and also, without intending to, the exclusion of women from that achievement's public honours. The 2025–2026 project does not erase that record. It adds a second band of 72 names, chosen through a public, institutional process with explicit criteria, to stand beside the first. The women on it range from an eighteenth-century midwife and a botanist who sailed around the world in disguise, to the discoverer of francium, the physician who found the extra chromosome in Down syndrome, and pioneers of computing and general relativity. Taken together, they show that women were doing science all along, and that the question was never whether they belonged on the tower, but whether anyone would write their names there.

Sources

• List of women's names for the Eiffel Tower (Wikipedia)
• Femmes & Sciences, "72 femmes de sciences pour la tour Eiffel" (booklet, 2026)
• Sortiraparis, "Eiffel Tower: a list of 72 women scientists will soon be inscribed on the Parisian monument" (2026)
• List of the 72 names on the Eiffel Tower (Wikipedia)
• Eiffel Tower (Wikipedia)
• Sophie Germain (Wikipedia)
• Matilda effect (Wikipedia)
• L'actualité chimique, No. 512 (March 2026)