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Donna Strickland (left) and Frances Arnold receive their Nobel Prizes in 2018, making them two of just 22 women ever to do soHenrik Montgomery/Pool Photo via AP
▼ This year, only one woman won a Nobel Prize in a science field—and that makes it a pretty ordinary year. Since the awards were first given in 1901, only six women have ever won the physics prize, five the chemistry award, and 12 the medicine or physiology prize. Economics is the new kid on the block: It began to give prizes in 1969. Its laureates count only two women among them: Elinor Ostrom, who won in 2009, and Esther Duflo, this year.
In all, women have taken home just 22 Nobels, about 3% of the total. And half of the prizes that have gone to women, 11, were awarded since 2000. (Men have won many more over the same period: 185.)
Liselotte Jauffred, a physicist at the University of Copenhagen, wondered about the factors that might be influencing the gender representation in Nobel awards. For example, Nobels famously honor work done years or decades earlier. So, were women simply underrepresented in research fields during the long-ago years now being honored?
To find out, Jauffred and two colleagues looked at the data. And they concluded that there’s a 96% likelihood that bias against women, not underrepresentation, accounts for the gender distribution seen in the Nobel Prizes.
Jauffred recently talked withScienceInsider about the work. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Q: The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said it has increasedthe number of female nominees for the prizes. Yet, the results don’t seem encouraging. In 2018, two women won Nobels: Frances Arnold in chemistry and Donna Strickland in physics. This year there was one female winner. Can your study say whether these numbers are flukes or signs of progress?
A:We cannot say anything about trends based on a single year. We did [develop a simulation that showed that] every year the chance that the winners will be all men in chemistry, economics, and physics is over 80%, and medicine is around 60%. … In the last 20 years, there have been about the same number of women Nobel laureates as in the first 100 years. It’s progressing in the right direction, but not fast enough.
Q: Can your study say anything about the sources of bias? (▪ ▪ ▪)
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