Nobel Prize signals level playing field for women
A banner year for female Nobel laureates highlights incremental but
steady progress for women in science’s mostly male bastions, say experts
who point to greater funding and career opportunities for women than
ever before.
A record five women were awarded Nobels this year — nearly one-eighth
of the 41 awards to female recipients in the 108-year history of the
prize. Until now, the highest number of women honored in a single year
was three, in 2004.
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Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Economics prize.
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This year’s winners included: Herta Mueller who took the literature
prize; Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider for physiology or medicine;
Ada Yonath for chemistry; and in a major breakthrough, Elinor Ostrom for
economics — the first time a woman has won in that field.
Ostrom, 76, said she was “very surprised” to learn she had won, but
hoped this year’s awards serve as inspiration to a new generation of
female students and researchers.
`Ten women have won the prestigious medicine award since the first
Nobel prizes were handed out in 1901, but 2009 marks the first time that
two women received the award in the same year.
Greider said a sort of emerging old girls’ network is aiding women
researchers who have been boxed out of high-power science careers by the
more traditional old boys’ network.
“I think there’s a slight bias of women to work for women, because
there’s still a slight cultural bias for men to help men,” she said in
Monday’s New York Times.
“It’s not that they are biased against women or want to hurt them.
They just don’t think of them. And they often feel more comfortable
promoting their male colleagues,” she told the Times.
Donna Dean, an eminent US researcher and regulatory scientist, said
one reason women did not always receive the accolades they deserved had
to do with their status at the bottom of the totem pole at research labs
and in academia.
“Women have always carried out research at the highest levels; it is
just that they were so often not recognized — or nominated for the
prestigious prizes — for that work when their male colleagues and peers
have been,” she said.
New laureate Yonath told an interviewer last year that in a world
where there were not many women role models in science, she reached back
for inspiration to Marie Curie, the first woman scientist to be awarded
a Nobel — twice, for physics in 1903 and chemistry in 1911.
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