Stanford Professor Carolyn Bertozzi was one of two women to win Nobel Prizes this year. (AP ... [+]
Only two women took home Nobel Prizes this year. This number represents a marked increase from last year, when only one woman received the honor. Once again, the economics prize was awarded exclusively to men.
Carolyn Bertozzi was one of the two women award winners this year, winning the Nobel for chemistry. She shared the chemistry prize with two men, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless, and won for her contributions to click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry. Bertozzi is the eighth woman to receive the honor and follows in the footsteps of Marie Curie, who was the first woman to receive the chemistry prize in 1911. A whopping 183 men have received the chemistry award since its inception.
Katalin Karikó, whose groundbreaking work on mRNA technology was critical to developing the Covid-19 vaccines, was again overlooked this year for the chemistry prize.
French novelist Annie Ernaux took home the Nobel for literature and is the 17th woman to win this award. The prize was awarded to Ernaux “for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory,” according to the Nobel Prize site. The literature and peace prizes are the two Nobels most frequently awarded to women, and it’s a promising sign for the future that since 2000, women have received eight Nobels for literature.
In total, women have only won 61 Nobel Prizes, compared with men, who have been awarded 895 Nobel prizes. Only one woman, Marie Curie, has been honored twice, with the Nobel in physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911.
Perhaps the most striking gender discrepancy comes in the field of economics. In 1968, Sweden’s central bank established the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, founder of the Nobel Prize. The first prize in economic sciences was awarded in 1969 to two men.
Since its inception, only two women have received the economics prize, Elinor Ostrom in 2009 and Esther Duflo in 2019. The remaining 89 awards went to men. Economics professor Viola Angelini has pointed out on Twitter, “Among the #NobelPrize winners in economics, we can count 9 men called Robert but only 2 women.” Her calculation is sadly correct.
The lack of women awardees can be partly attributed to the fact that relatively few women choose to study economics. The share of women in economics is below many other male-dominated fields, including science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and it’s not increasing much. In college, men are about three times more likely than women to major in economics, and only about a third of those graduating with an economics doctorate are women.
Yet, even with these unbalanced statistics in the field, we’d still expect women to take home a third of the Nobel prizes. Unfortunately, even women with PhDs in this field face substantial discrimination.
Equally qualified women economics PhDs are less likely than their male counterparts to earn a spot at a top university, which impacts their ability to collaborate with leading researchers and serve as coauthors on publications. Even when women economists can find collaborators, they face bias. One researcher found that women get less credit when collaborating with men on economics research.
These findings are not due to a lack of competence on the part of women economists. Instead, it’s due to systemic bias in the field. This bias is illustrated by comments on EconJobRumores.com, an online forum where economists discuss job openings and candidates. When talking about women candidates, economists on the site were more likely to discuss their appearance and family life. When discussing male economists, they were more likely to emphasize their academic and professional accomplishments. It’s not surprising that men get more credit for their contributions.
A perusal of photographs of Nobel Laureates in economics reveals that gender isn’t the only diversity issue. The predominance of white men is overwhelming. This lack of diversity isn’t necessarily the prize committee's fault because the problems start early in one’s career and impact the economist’s productivity from the outset. However, seeing these white men take home the prizes, again and again, reinforces the notion that the contributions of other groups are not valued. It may deter some from studying economics and add to the already-existing bias in this field.
