Allison Tyra is the creator of Infinite Women, an online biographical database launched in 2020 that has grown to include more than 9,000 women’s stories from around the world, throughout history and across different areas of impact. She launched the weekly podcast of the same name in 2023 and also makes short-form videos for YouTube. Her first book, Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work (2025) came out of this work as she kept seeing the same patterns repeated across the huge range of women’s history and wanted to dispel myths around women’s capabilities by showing how their work and accomplishments have been downplayed and covered up by sexist forces.

Take it away, Allison!

What inspired you to start Infinite Women?

It’s very common to see listicles of “Five women artists you should know” or “Eight women scientists who changed the world” and so on, but there are never just five or eight women. So, being my spreadsheet-loving self, I started a list – that spreadsheet is now 240,000+ and constantly growing. It’s the kind of project that will never be completed, because there are always more women to find.

How do you chose the women whose biographies you post on the website?

All of my work is built on the work of others, from my books to the database to, of course, the podcast. While I do write some of the bios myself, the vast majority are shared with permission from other sources. So the biggest factor is what it’s available from other sources I can find. But that includes thousands of bios, so within that pool, I typically prioritize under-told stories and increasing the diversity and range of women in the database. The less representation a group has, the more I want to increase it, whether that’s disability, queerness, race or simply being from a less common category like architecture or archeology. I want people to be able to find as many examples of whatever kinds of women they’re looking for.

How do you choose the topics for your podcast episodes?

I don’t! My podcast is much broader than most, and I joke that I’ll talk about anything but cis dudes (and yet I somehow still get pitches from publicists wanting me to talk about them!). So that gives me the freedom to invite authors, historians, curators, etc. to just come and talk about their work. Sometimes something will catch my eye, like a book that looks interesting or something I see on Bluesky and I’ll invite the relevant person for a chat. But my only strategy is that I want to talk to people about interesting topics that they’re passionate and knowledgeable about, whether that’s a scandal in colonial Mexico or Ottoman wedding trousseaus.

You are also the author of Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed and Stolen Work, which includes more than 600 stories from throughout history and around the world. How did you choose the stories?  Were there stories you were unhappy to leave out?

I describe my research for Uncredited as “passive” – other than a few internet searches for relevant keywords and phrases, I mostly just Venus fly trapped my way through, making notes each time I’d come across a story. This obviously happened a lot with my Infinite Women work, and I was fortunate not to have to cut any – in fact, I have 30 pages of links and notes with even more stories I’ve come across since then! Like I say, there’s always more women to find…

What was the most surprising thing you’ve found doing historical research for your work?

From a gendered standpoint, it was not only how much women’s history gets left out, but how hard patriarchal forces have to *work* to keep women out and cover up their stories. In Uncredited, I differentiate between what you might call neglect and intentional harm – the difference between the sexist assumption a woman was an assistant when she was an equal partner (or a model rather than one of the women actually programming the ENIAC computer!) and a man actively stealing credit from a woman.

What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical woman?

I love patterns. I think the value I bring to the field is that while most people are focused on specific areas, I’m looking at such a broad (pun intended) picture that I can connect dots that those folks might not see, across time and place and fields of work. That’s really what Uncredited does, breaking down “we know women are as good as men, so why haven’t I heard of more women?” from “sexism… duh” into the specific mechanics of how that sexism plays out in real time and retroactively regardless of when and where and what profession we’re talking about. I over-analyze everything, so it’s nice to be able to apply it to something useful!

What work of women’s history have you read lately that you loved?  (Or for that matter, what work of women’s history have you loved in any format?)

I just finished Mattie Kahn’s Young and Restless: The Girls Who Sparked America’s Revolutions, which I really enjoyed. I’m currently reading Chop Fry Watch Learn: Fu Pei-mei and the Making of Modern Chinese Food by Michelle T. King, and if that sounds like your jam, I adored Mayukh Sen’s Taste Makers: Seven Immigrant Women Who Revolutionized Food in America as well.

Not so much history, but my two feminist “I love this book, everyone should read it” recommendations are Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men and Soraya Chemaly’s Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger.

A question from Allison: We all know history narratives are shaped by individual and societal biases. As someone who tells these stories, what advice do you have for trying to identify and offset those biases in historical source materials, and to be aware of and minimize any you might have, to tell as accurate a version of history as possible?

These are question I struggle with all the time, and there are no easy answers.

I learned the most basic lesson about this my second week in graduate school in an independent study with my advisor, the great Barney Cohn.  The structure was simple. He assigned a book. I came back the next week to talk about what I had read. He proceeded to blow my brain up. In our second session, and first real discussion, I was prattling happily about what I had read[1]. He stopped me and asked “What’s the source of that information?” I stammered a non-answer to a question it hadn’t occurred to me to ask. He then gave me an introductory primer on the inevitable bias in sources, particularly in the context of the colonial world. Asking “What’s the source of this information? What are the biases?” has been an intrinsic part of my process ever since. Sometimes, particularly in my book Women Warriors, the discussion of those questions becomes a critical part of the book.

Checking for my own biases is more difficult. (How do you see your way around a blind spot?). These days a large part of my personal work—as a historian, an American, and a human being–is coming to terms with the disjunction between the history we were taught and the history that was left untold. When that disjunction leaves me feeling sick at my stomach, I know I’ve come up against one of those blind spots. As I’ve said before on this blog, history is hard and I’ve come to believe it should be.

[1] I don’t remember what the book was. And I doubt if it matters. I suspect the result would have been the same no matter what.

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Want to learn more about Allison and Infinite Women?

Check out her website:  https://www.infinite-women.com/
Explore the Infinite Women biographical database:  https://www.infinite-women.com/infinite-women/
Listen to the weekly Infinite Women podcast: https://www.infinite-women.com/podcast/
Watch the short Infinite Women videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@infinite_women
Check out her book: Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work (2025): https://www.infinite-women.com/books/
Sign up for the weekly Infinite Women newsletter:  https://www.infinite-women.com/weekly-newsletter/

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Come back tomorrow for four questions and an answer with Joanne Mulcahy