In this, the dawn of the 21st century, women are an established part of the scientific, technical, and management workforce in the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). This may seem a mundane fact not worth thinking about, but it is the premise of this article that we cannot understand where we are without looking back at the path we’ve traveled, and that path is worth thinking about. When we do this, we see that the social changes that have shaped our world during the 125 years of USGS existence are also reflected in the history of women in the USGS. The prominence of women in the USGS is a relatively recent development and to put that in context, we shall briefly review the history of the marine activities within the USGS, the changing roles of the USGS, and at the appropriate points, populate the story with those women who blazed the trail to the point where we find ourselves today.

Lavoie, D., and D. Hutchinson. 2005. The U.S. Geological Survey: Sea-going women. Oceanography 18(1):39–46, https://doi.org/10.5670/oceanog.2005.69.

This is an open access article made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution, and reproduction in any medium or format as long as users cite the materials appropriately, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate the changes that were made to the original content. Images, animations, videos, or other third-party material used in articles are included in the Creative Commons license unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If the material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission directly from the license holder to reproduce the material.