124 years later, gender gap in Nobel Prize still persists

Every October, the Nobel Prize Committee awards the coveted prize to laureates in six categories: physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine, literature, peace and economics. The economy was added in 1968 through a “perpetual” donation from Sweden’s central bank, Sveriges Riksbank.

Since December 10, 1901, when the first Nobel Prize was awarded in Stockholm, Sweden, only 66 of the 976 laureates have been awarded to women. This year there were 11 laureates – 10 men and one woman (literature). The Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a Japanese grassroots organization of survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As unlikely as it may seem, 2023 is a banner year for women, with four female laureates going up against seven male laureates.

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It is clear that the choice of who will receive the Nobel Prize is heavily biased towards men. Physics has the worst results. Of the 226 recipients, only five are women, and three were awarded in the last six years. The numbers, while discouraging, should not come as a surprise as the Nobel Prize has a history of sexist practices that do not recognize the pioneering work and discoveries made by women in science.

The list of women who should have received the Nobel Prize in Physics but did not is long. Listed below are some egregious cases in which prominent female physicists and astronomers were rejected by the Nobel Prize committee because of their gender.

Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear fission, overlooking Lise Meitner, who collaborated with him on the discovery in 1938. Together with her nephew Otto Frisch, she also provided the first theoretical explanation of a reaction in which an atom breaks down into smaller atoms. Khan published their work without crediting her as a co-author. He did not even acknowledge the role she played in his success, as he maintained that Meitner was his junior assistant and not his colleague.

The lack of a Nobel Prize did not in any way affect Meitner’s reputation as a scientist. In contrast, 1922 Nobel Prize winner in physics Niels Bohr considered her an exemplary noble scientist, and Einstein called her “the German Marie Curie.” She received the Enrico Fermi Prize, awarded by the President of the United States, and the 109th element, meitnerium, was named in her honor. The tombstone on her grave reads: “The physicist who never lost his humanity.”

Austrian physicist Marietta Blau was the first to develop the use of emulsions to track and identify relativistic particles. She was nominated for the Nobel Prize in chemistry once and four times in physics, but the prize remained elusive. Cecil Frank Powell received the 1950 Nobel Prize in Physics, in part for his discovery of the elementary particle pion using the emulsion method developed by Blau.

In 1956, Chien-Shiung Wu experimentally confirmed Chen-Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Li’s prediction of parity violation. Parity is a symmetry transformation in which the spatial coordinates of a particle change sign. In 1957, it was men, not Wu, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

One of the most outrageous and shameful cases of a female scientist being denied the honor of a Nobel Prize is Rosalind Franklin, a biophysicist whose work on X-ray diffraction confirmed the helical structure of DNA. Her colleagues Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins received the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work based on data allegedly stolen from Franklin’s laboratory. She wasn’t even nominated for an award. Franklin died of ovarian cancer at the age of 37. Watson, on the other hand, is a pariah in the scientific community for using his reputation to promote racist and sexist ideas.

The graduate student who was beaten out for the Nobel Prize by two men who worked alongside her is Jocelyn Bell Burnell. She did not share the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics with Martin Ryle and her doctoral supervisor Anthony Hewish for the discovery of radio pulsars, despite Burnell being the one who actually discovered them in 1967. condemned the award, which the Nobel Prize is often called “a prize without a bell.” To top it all off, pulsars are responsible for two more Nobel laureates. Russell Hulse and Joseph Taylor Jr. were awarded the prize in 1993 “for their discovery of a new type of pulsar.” In a 2004 essay in the journal Science, Jocelyn Burnell suggested that, in addition to gender, her student status may have contributed to her omission.

Vera Rubin, one of the most brilliant astronomers of the 20th century, was denied a Nobel Prize for her precise calculations showing that galaxies and stars are caught in the gravitational grip of vast clouds of Dark Matter, one of the largest ever to exist in the Universe. -solvable scientific riddles. Rubin was careless about fame and the Nobel Prize. In her opinion, “the real reward is finding something new.”

Other women physicists who were ignored by the Nobel committee include Mildred Dresselhaus for her work on the structure of carbon, which sparked an explosion of research, much of it now part of a field called nanoscience; Annie Cannon, who single-handedly observed and classified more than 200,000 stars based on their color; Emmy Noether, whom Einstein called a “creative mathematical genius,” for her eponymous theorem relating conservation laws to symmetries in nature; Cecilia Payne – for discovering what stars are made of; and much more.

Because nominations for the prizes and discussions surrounding them were kept secret for 50 years, it is difficult to say how many women have been nominated over the 124-year history of the Nobel Prize. But the number is probably not large. Additionally, the Nobel Committee is clearly unwilling to consider minorities and people of color for physics awards.

Even though science has reached new heights with pioneering contributions in a male-dominated world of scientists, it is unfortunate that women still have to face prejudice against them. It may not be possible to correct bias in the awarding of the Nobel Prize without changing its fundamental structure. Otherwise, this is just another example, among many that could be listed, of widespread “old-fashioned sexism in science.”

Dr. Kamrul Haider is Professor Emeritus at Fordham University in New York, USA.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author.

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