Women in diving history.

Penelope Powell and Wookey Hole, 1935

Divernet (1 April 2024) says Penelope Powell was Diver No. 2, acting as safeguard to team leader Graham Balcombe, on what it calls the first successful cave dive using breathing equipment in Britain, at Wookey Hole in Somerset on 18 August 1935. The dive was broadcast on BBC radio. A PADI blog by Gemma Smith (17 November 2017), seen as a search summary, gives the date as 14 July 1935; the two dates may refer to different dives.

Divernet says Powell co-wrote "The Log of the Wookey Hole Exploration Expedition", which it describes as the first cave-diving book, and that she died in 1965. She was inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame posthumously, on 23 March 2024. Balcombe went on to found, or co-found, Britain's Cave Diving Group in 1946, as described on cave and technical diving.

The first woman scuba diver: two claims

Two women are each called the first, by different sources:

• Simone Melchior Cousteau. The Ocean Futures Society, run by the Cousteau family, calls her the first woman scuba diver, and so does the Women Divers Hall of Fame listing as reported by Wikipedia.
• Lotte Hass. DeeperBlue calls her the first woman to dive with autonomous diving equipment. She dived on a rebreather, starting in 1949 according to DeeperBlue or 1950 according to Wikipedia.

The claims use different words, scuba in one and autonomous equipment in the other, and the sources do not settle which came first.

The Ocean Futures Society says Simone Melchior was born in Toulon on 19 January 1919, married Jacques-Yves Cousteau in 1937 and died in 1990. It says she was instrumental in acquiring the ship Calypso and looked after its crew for 40 years. Wikipedia says she was inducted into the Women Divers Hall of Fame in 2017 and calls her the first woman scuba diver and aquanaut; a search summary says she spent the final days of the 1963 Conshelf II experiment in its Red Sea habitat. We could not confirm the induction year, the aquanaut claim or the Conshelf detail from a primary source.

DeeperBlue also credits Lotte Hass as the first underwater model and later the first female professional underwater photographer; those are the publication's claims. Her life with Hans Hass is on Hans and Lotte Hass.

The first woman instructor: also disputed

The History of Diving Museum says Dottie Frazier, born on 15 July 1922, was a skin-diving instructor by the 1940s and was turned away from an underwater instructor course in 1955 because it was for men only. It says she later became what it calls the world's first female scuba instructor. The museum says she ran a dive shop in Long Beach, California for 15 years, designed some of the first wetsuits made for women, published her autobiography "Trailblazer" in 2019, and died in February 2022 aged 99.

The "first" is not settled:

• The History of Diving Museum credits Dottie Frazier as the first female scuba instructor.
• PADI's 2017 list, seen as a search summary, calls her "one of the first".
• Other sources describe Zale Parry as one of the first women certified as a scuba instructor, in the 1950s.

Search summaries also describe Zale Parry as an underwater stunt double and technical adviser on the television series Sea Hunt, as helping to set up one of the first civilian hyperbaric chambers in California, and as a co-founder of the International Underwater Film Festival. We could not open a primary source for any of those details.

Scientists

NOAA's National Ocean Service says Eugenie Clark was born in New York City on 4 May 1922, learned to scuba dive at Scripps, earned her PhD from New York University in 1950 and published "Lady with a Spear" in 1953. In 1955 she founded the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, now Mote Marine Laboratory. NOAA says she made her last dive in June 2014 and died on 25 February 2015, aged 92.

Guinness World Records lists Sylvia Earle's 381 m (1,250 ft) dive in a JIM suit on 19 September 1979 as the deepest untethered sea walk by a woman; Guinness says she rode a submersible down and then released herself from it. Wikipedia notes that the JIM suit is an atmospheric diving suit, not scuba. The location is given two ways: Britannica, seen as a search summary, says off Oahu, Hawaii, while the Guinness page lists the United Kingdom. A Britannica search summary also says Earle was NOAA's chief scientist from 1990 to 1992, the first woman in that post; the page itself could not be opened, so that is unconfirmed.

The Women Divers Hall of Fame

Wikipedia says the Women Divers Hall of Fame was founded in 1999 by a group of people and organisations, including the Underwater Society of America, to honour women's contributions across the diving fields. It says 72 women were inducted in the first class, in 2000, and 26 in 2001, and that the Hall had 263 members as of 2025. No page on the Hall's own site surfaced during research, so these figures rest on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia names these among the 2000 class: Cathy Church, Sylvia Earle, Dottie Frazier, Lotte Hass, Hillary Hauser, Mehgan Heaney-Grier, Jill Heinerth, Zale Parry, Dee Scarr, Tanya Streeter, Valerie Taylor and Jill Yager.

Wikipedia also lists later members with firsts of their own, with the year each was inducted: Mary Bonnin (2001), the first woman US Navy Master Diver; Donna Tobias (2001), the US Navy's first female deep-sea diver; and Kathryn Sullivan (2008), the first woman to dive into the Challenger Deep. Guinness World Records dates Sullivan's Challenger Deep descent, made in the submersible DSV Limiting Factor, to 7 June 2020, so the 2008 induction year does not refer to that dive. We have not confirmed the Bonnin and Tobias firsts individually.