Marie shared the 1903 Nobel prize in chemistry with her husband and Bequerel. Seems like relevant authorities at the time thought she had a substantial role. Why should we believe you rather than the Nobel Committee? It's not like 1903 was a big year for establishment scientists looking for female mascots...

I'm not well versed on the early history of programming languages, and don't want to opine based on glancing at Wikipedia. But Hopper appears to have been involved in a bunch of pre-Fortran work on higher-level languages: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A-0_System -- so this isn't simply about COBOL.