The Nobel Prize has a big gender gap problem

We have entered the week of the Nobel Prize awards, a fixed event in October. The first assigned in 2024 is, as tradition, that for medicine, assigned to the Americans Ambros and Ruvkun, discoverers of micro RNA. Two men. It seems like an objective fact but it is also ‘a link’ to talk about an issue, that of gender, which is central when talking about the recognition awarded by the Stockholm academy. In fact, 2023 was a year of great redemption, with four female personalities awarded compared to seven men. But perhaps most importantly, three women, Claudia Goldin for Economic Sciences, Katalin Karikó for Medicine and Anne L’Huillier for Physics, were awarded in fields that have been heavily dominated by men since the Prize’s inception Nobel in 1901. Here, this is the center of the problem: in its history, from 1901 to 2023, the Nobel has been awarded to 905 men and 65 women. Indeed, 64 to be precise because Marie Curie, the first scientist to receive it, is the only woman to have been awarded twice.

Furthermore, most of the awards awarded to women concern two categories outside of those more commonly defined as STEM (Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) such as ‘peace’ and ‘literature’.

The graph published by Statista shows well this gender distribution of all the winners, illustrating the wide gender gap, particularly in fields such as chemistry, physics and economics, where less than five percent of all winners belong to the female universe The Nobel Peace Prize, in particular, has been awarded more often to women: last year, Iranian human rights activist Narges Mohammadi became the 19th woman awarded in this category. How will it go this year?