Nature: The Nobels and diversity
The Nobel Prizes in science are selected through a secretive process by a select group of people who are already empowered and respected. It’s the kind of system that doesn’t just support the status quo, it’s tailor made to keep those on the outs … out. And it absolutely supports white male domination of the awards. So what is the Nobel foundation doing to change that?
If a woman wins the Nobel Prize in Physics next week, she will be the first to do so in more than 50 years. Over the same period, just one woman has won in chemistry.
This gender imbalance is the subject of increasing criticism, much of which is aimed at the Nobel committees that award the honours. In the awards’ history, women have won only 3% of the science prizes (see ‘Nobel imbalance’), and the overwhelming majority have gone to scientists in Western nations. Some argue simply that the prizes tend to recognize work from an era when the representation of women and non-Western researchers in science was even lower than it is today. But studies repeatedly show that systemic biases remain in the sciences, and the slow pace of progress was especially evident in 2017, when there were no female laureates for the second year in a row.
In 2016 and in 2017 there were no women nominated for a Nobel prize in any science. That’s on top of the already acknowledged decades in which the Nobels have sometimes gone to ludicrous lengths to avoid acknowledging the contributions of women. It’s the kind of statistic that argues for radical reform — or for abandoning the idea that the Nobels are in any way connected to scientific excellence. If you’d like to get a better sense of the true scale of the imbalance, I’d encourage checking out the charts connected to this article.
In a week where the focus seemed to be the coordinated effort to keep marginalize women — one that included the Republican Party taking extraordinary steps to even acknowledge the existence of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford by preventing any of their senators from as much as exchanging a word of greeting with her — the baked-in sexism of the Nobels is way, way past the point where it can be ignored, or treated as something that can be handled with a long-term look by a committee. This kind of imbalance calls for direct and immediate address, or the Nobels should be regarded as something that used to be handed out for good performance — to good old boys.
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