Influential Women in the Field of Quality Management

My response, off the top of my head (there are plenty of others to include) to Who Has Inspired You About Quality? by Nicole Radziwill.

I searched online and found a nice “List of Gurus” that someone put together that includes my extra picks! But!! There’s a problem with it. Where area the women? The one woman in this list is someone I’ve never heard of, which is odd, since I’ve read papers by (or about!) all of the other people referenced in the list. Which brings me back to my original point: Where are all the women quality gurus? It’s time to start celebrating their emerging legacy. If you are a woman who has made significant contributions to our understanding and/or practice of quality and improvement, Please contact me. I’d like to write an article soon.

Joyce Orsini and Gipsie Ranney have done lots of good stuff. So has Clare Crawford Mason.

Gertrude Mary Cox isn't known so much for "quality" as statistics but she was an impressive person and a generation or two ahead of others (and it really is related to quality).

Mary Poppendieck has really good stuff at the intersection of quality and software development.

Meg Wheatley was really popular in the 1990s in the systems thinking area of quality. I thought her stuff was good, but wasn't as impressed with it as many people - I haven't seen her stuff in a long time.

There are a couple recent podcasts from the Deming Institute with Paula Marshall, Andrea Gabor and Monta Akin (as well as others listed above).

Most, or all, of those could be good articles.

Related: My post on Who Inspires Your Management Thinking and Action? - women in science and engineering