Nobel women

By winning the Nobel Prize in Physics for her work on laser technology, Donna Strickland – a laser physicist at the University of Waterloo in Ontario – has become only the third woman to win the award. The last was nuclear physicist Maria Goeppert Mayer in 1963 and the only other woman to have won it was Marie Curie all the way back in 1903. Taking Nobel Laureates as a whole, the gender bias is shockingly skewed. Strickland is only the fiftieth woman to win a Nobel Prize. In that time more than 850 men have been awarded what is widely considered the most prestigious title in the world. Of the 50 women, 30 Nobel Laureates are in the ‘softer’ peace and literature categories. Clearly, the Nobels are heavily biased towards men – and it isn’t because of a lack of worthy women nominees. Part of the problem is the gender bias in the sciences itself. This starts all the way from childhood, as girls are discouraged from pursuing the hard sciences and mathematics, and instead encouraged to go into more ‘creative’ fields. No less a figure than Lawrence Summers, who was then president of Harvard University, suggested in 2005 that men might have a greater intellectual aptitude for success in the sciences. Discrimination is rife and the Nobel Prizes are a reflection of such attitudes.

But there is a problem with the Nobel Prizes themselves and how they are awarded. Prizes in the sciences are awarded to individuals for their work in groundbreaking fields. In the case of Strickland, she has shared her Physics prize with two male researchers. But the sciences are a collaborative field. Most research and peer-reviewed papers are carried out by teams of dozens of scientists but the Nobel is awarded only to the senior-most researchers. Since women have to work twice as hard to advance to positions men take for granted – a problem that is magnified in the sciences – they tend to win a smaller share of awards even in fields where women are part of Nobel-worthy scientific breakthroughs. This problem in selection has a racial component as well. Scientists from credentialed universities in the West are always given preference even if similar work has been carried out by others in Africa and Asia. No one doubts that every Nobel Laureate in the scientific disciplines has contributed to the advancement on knowledge in a significant way. But that does not change the fact that the way the winners are chosen share the same blind spots to gender and racial inequalities as the rest of elite, Western society.