Lillian Gilbreth

Lillian Moller was a shy, sickly child in Oakland, California, who was kept out of school until she was nine. She went on to graduate from the University of California and became the first woman to speak at its commencement. In 1904 she married Frank Gilbreth, a self-made building contractor obsessed with finding the one best way of doing any task, and together they turned that obsession into a discipline.

They had twelve children, and the family was run like one of their studies, with process charts on the bathroom wall. Two of the children later described it in the book Cheaper by the Dozen. Lillian took a doctorate in psychology in 1915 while raising them, and brought to Frank's motion studies something he lacked: an interest in the worker as a person, in fatigue, in why people resisted change.

In 1924 Frank died suddenly of a heart attack, leaving her with eleven children to support and a consulting business whose clients assumed the expertise had been his. Most of them left. She rebuilt the firm herself, teaching courses in her own home, and turned to work that industry would accept from a woman: the design of kitchens. The layout with sink, stove and refrigerator in a compact triangle, the foot-pedal bin and the shelves in fridge doors all trace to her studies.

She became a professor of management at Purdue in 1935 and consulted into her eighties. She was the first woman elected to the National Academy of Engineering.