VIEWPOINT
The Nobel Prize: An ignoble history of gender bias By Krystal Jacques
M
ost of us have heard of the prestigious Nobel Prize, awarded annually in five categories: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, and Peace. There is also an additional Memorial Prize in Economics. Not a single woman was awarded last year.1 This may or may not be coincidental. Where does this award come from in the first place? And how are awardees selected from hundreds of candidates? How does one decide on whom to choose? The process behind the Nobel Prize is elusive to most of the public, but the controversial ways in which people are selected for the award warrants public attention. The Royal Swedish Academy, which was founded in 1739, initiated the existence of the five categories of the Nobel Prize in 1835 after the death of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and engineer.2 Alfred Nobel amassed a fortune during his lifetime due to his impressive 355 inventions. His will specified that his fortune be used to create a series of prizes for individuals who create the “greatest benefit on mankind in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace.”2 I imagine the process of deciding whose work fulfills this criteria is not entirely unbiased. Each award recipient, known as a Nobel Laureate, receives a diploma, a gold medal, and a sum of money. As of 2020, each award in each category is worth about $935, 366 U.S. The recipient of the award must be alive, and the award cannot be granted to more than three individuals in any one category. The Royal Swedish Academy’s core committee of 18 Swedish members confidentially invites people to nominate 24 |
potential winners. Those who are invited to nominate generally include its own members, past Nobel Laureates in the field, tenured professors from Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and Norway, department chairs from elsewhere, and other scientists or presidents of author societies. Membership lasts three years. Today the committee who nominates and selects awardees consist of 440 Swedish and 175 international members.1 In the last few years, more women were elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awards the Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry and economics. By involving more women in the selection and nomination process, the organizations that award the Nobel Prizes hoped bias towards males being selected would be reduced.3 However, this is most likely unhelpful as it has been well documented that women do not select women any more than men during the process of evaluation for recruiting in the academic and nonacademic workforce, and when reviewing publications for journal acceptance.4,5,6 The proportion of women who have won the Nobel prize in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine has remained consistent in the past century despite the growing number of women significantly contributing to the scientific research field.7 As of today there are only 46 female laureates. Out of these 46 women, only 16 were awarded the Nobel Prize for their contribution in research while the remaining 30 women obtained the prize in economics, literature and peace.7 Marie Curie was the first woman Nobel Laureate in physics — which was awarded in 1903. For the next six decades, no other women physicists were found eligible to receive this honor. In 1911,
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Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize again in Chemistry. Her daughter, Irene-Joliet Curie, was awarded a Nobel Prize, along with her husband, in Chemistry 24 years later for her work in the synthesis of new radioactive elements. Maria GoeppertMayer is the second female physicist to have won the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Wigner and Jensen in 1963. Gerty Cori was the third woman ever to have won the Nobel Prize for her work on identifying some of the intermediates formed during glucose metabolism. In retrospect, there are many other notable women who should have won the Nobel Prize to fill in the long gaps seen here, such as Nattic Maria Stevens whose work concluded that a combination of X and Y chromosomes could determine an individual’s sex. Rosalind Franklin’s story is an excellent example of how a woman researcher got pushed aside during the recognition process. Franklin was an expert on X-crystallography, and was one of the few scientists at the time trying to determine the structure of DNA.1 Based on her X-ray diffraction images Franklin had determined the precise distances between repetitive elements and angles formed by chemical bonds.8 She had written all her observations and measurements as an informal report which was sent to Max Perutz (who also won the Nobel Prize for his work on hemoglobin) at Cambridge University soon before she decided to abandon her work on DNA.8 Max Perutz shared her private work to his protégés Watson and Crick who realized that Franklin’s images immediately suggested a double helical structure of DNA. Watson and Crick interpreted Franklin’s data in new insightful ways to create a detailed model of double helical structure of DNA in 1953.8 At that time of proposal, Franklin Graphics by Chloe Ng
