Nobel science prize voices concern over lack of female laureates

[The One Percent]

The folly of the west handicapping itself will definitely be taught in schools when the next major power shift happens.

[Tomyris]

I wonder if there are still scientists being pushed down/aside because they're women. While I applaud their willingness to have a look and possibly reward a woman's scientist work, how do they know it is sexism involved? Maybe they know something we don't? I experienced myself different attitudes towards me at work due to being female but I would think that a female scientist with an activity worthy of Nobel prize would not be just stepped on or ignored in this day and age?
I am all for women working in whatever field they want and given same opportunities but forcing things won't help. I despise the pressure that it is on some women now to do everything that men do, if possibly being a perfect mother in the same time.

[Underverse]

That's fair. Then again, that might also be beneficial since they have to actually read the work until they realize whose it is, at which point they're likely far less likely to show bias toward a paper written by a woman or someone from, say, Morocco after actually seeing their work laid out like that, whereas they might be more skeptical of the processes listed if they knew beforehand.

You don't get Nobel prizes for papers. You get them for the actual, real impact of the summation of work that you do on the field. Usually this takes decades to manifest. In very rare cases, they can be awarded for contemporary discoveries (ex: gravitational waves), but in these cases, the discovery in question has been sought by the field for a very long time (these waves were theorized to exist a century ago).

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I wonder if there are still scientists being pushed down/aside because they're women. While I applaud their willingness to have a look and possibly reward a woman's scientist work, how do they know it is sexism involved? Maybe they know something we don't? I experienced myself different attitudes towards me at work due to being female but I would think that a female scientist with an activity worthy of Nobel prize would not be just stepped on or ignored in this day and age?
I am all for women working in whatever field they want and given same opportunities but forcing things won't help. I despise the pressure that it is on some women now to do everything that men do, if possibly being a perfect mother in the same time.

Here's the secret: all scientists get stepped on and ignored unless they fight for what's theirs. There are certainly isolated cases of sexism, but my feeling is that more often, cases where women are being stepped on are confused for sexism when it's something that in fact happens to both males and females. Perhaps males are more likely to fight than females - I'm not sure. But what I can say is that if a woman was on the team that discovered gravitational waves, she would have gotten the Nobel prize. No question about it.

[Shinra1]

Which racism/sexism in particular are you talking about, in regards to the Nobel prize system?

And while we're at it, how exactly are you quantifying the benefits of diversity and the drawbacks of quotas? It sounds like you know the answer to that equation, but you don't provide any details.

Finally, what do you mean by 'being put in a position to do Nobel-prize worthy work'? Women and minorities do have a chance to work in cutting edge research labs. Whether or not a woman or a minority is awarded a Nobel prize doesn't have a lot to do with that. These prizes are largely luck based - right place, right time discoveries, and they're generally awarded to discoveries that were made 30+ years ago by people who were already faculty members.

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The current system has a long history of sexism and racism if you are denying that right off the bat I'm not entirely sure you're someone even worth responding to but I will give it a try. I'm sure you and every high-school and undergraduate biology student has heard of Francis Crick and James Watson (james is a exposed racist btw), the Nobel Prize–winning discoverers of the structure of DNA. But how many know that their work was only possible due to the essential data collected by Rosalind Franklin, whose data was shared without her permission? Franklin was never even nominated for the prize and there was no explanation for that. More shocking perhaps is the story of Lederberg and her husband, Joshua, both microbiologists who made big advances in the field. They published several papers together, but Joshua's name appeared first. Esther Lederberg even invented replica plating method that allowed Joshua Lederberg’s shared Nobel Prize in 1958. Esther was never nominated or even acknowledged. The sexism evident in these two cases and MANY OTHERS is further supported by the numbers. Out of 204 laureates in physics, only two have been women. Women are just four out of 175 laureates in chemistry, and out of 214 winners in medicine, only 12 have been women. For comparison, 182 countries around the world have a more equal gender breakdown in their parliaments, including Saudi Arabia and Iran. Apart from sexism, the prizes have overwhelmingly favored scientists of European descent, though there has been some improvement in this arena.

This can only perpetuate gender and racial inequalities in science, especially further along in an academic career. In 2013, only 28.4 percent of the world’s scientists and only 11 percent of senior scientists were women. In the U.S. in 2010, white women constituted only 18 percent of the engineering and science workforce, with black and Hispanic men and women making up less than 4 percent each.
Reforming the prizes requires reinvention and that's where quotas in universities and private labs come in. Diversity quotas are meritocracy in action
For centuries, there was a quota for the representation of men in science. It was 100 per cent. It's easy to quantify the benefits of diversity and the drawbacks of quotas by systematically comparing the work and the pace of progress being made before the quotas were put in place with the quality of work and the pace of progress after the quotas. There are stacks of research that confirm that gender diversity on boards and work places results in better performance on every measure, including finance. And there's widespread agreement too that male-dominated cultures in the top echelons of banking and business created ghettos of groupthink and excessive risk taking. Those narrow cultures were at the heart of what went wrong in the global financial crisis. "A male atmosphere creates more risk and a greater risk of corruption." was even said by the Swedish prime minister a while ago.

With all of that said I would actually think another good idea is to award noble prizes for science not scientists and many people have been arguing for this as well that is to award the prizes to groups of researches including everyone who contributed to the prize wining work in lieu of just 3 scientists (usually old white men).

[Grimbold21]

Throws statistics around, immediately attributes the differences to an agenda of persecution and suppression...

[Incredibale]

1. Women are better off at home raising children anyway.
2. The gender gap is caused by women's choices of majors.

[Underverse]

The current system has a long history of sexism and racism if you are denying that right off the bat I'm not entirely sure you're someone even worth responding to but I will give it a try. I'm sure you and every high-school and undergraduate biology student has heard of Francis Crick and James Watson (james is a exposed racist btw), the Nobel Prize–winning discoverers of the structure of DNA. But how many know that their work was only possible due to the essential data collected by Rosalind Franklin, whose data was shared without her permission? Franklin was never even nominated for the prize and there was no explanation for that. More shocking perhaps is the story of Lederberg and her husband, Joshua, both microbiologists who made big advances in the field. They published several papers together, but Joshua's name appeared first. Esther Lederberg even invented replica plating method that allowed Joshua Lederberg’s shared Nobel Prize in 1958. Esther was never nominated or even acknowledged. The sexism evident in these two cases and MANY OTHERS is further supported by the numbers. Out of 204 laureates in physics, only two have been women. Women are just four out of 175 laureates in chemistry, and out of 214 winners in medicine, only 12 have been women. For comparison, 182 countries around the world have a more equal gender breakdown in their parliaments, including Saudi Arabia and Iran. Apart from sexism, the prizes have overwhelmingly favored scientists of European descent, though there has been some improvement in this arena.

This can only perpetuate gender and racial inequalities in science, especially further along in an academic career. In 2013, only 28.4 percent of the world’s scientists and only 11 percent of senior scientists were women. In the U.S. in 2010, white women constituted only 18 percent of the engineering and science workforce, with black and Hispanic men and women making up less than 4 percent each.
Reforming the prizes requires reinvention and that's where quotas in universities and private labs come in. Diversity quotas are meritocracy in action
For centuries, there was a quota for the representation of men in science. It was 100 per cent. It's easy to quantify the benefits of diversity and the drawbacks of quotas by systematically comparing the work and the pace of progress being made before the quotas were put in place with the quality of work and the pace of progress after the quotas. There are stacks of research that confirm that gender diversity on boards and work places results in better performance on every measure, including finance. And there's widespread agreement too that male-dominated cultures in the top echelons of banking and business created ghettos of groupthink and excessive risk taking. Those narrow cultures were at the heart of what went wrong in the global financial crisis. "A male atmosphere creates more risk and a greater risk of corruption." was even said by the Swedish prime minister a while ago.

With all of that said I would actually think another good idea is to award noble prizes for science not scientists and many people have been arguing for this as well that is to award the prizes to groups of researches including everyone who contributed to the prize wining work in lieu of just 3 scientists (usually old white men).

I'm very familiar with the controversy surrounding Franklin's lack of a Nobel prize, and yes, some Nobel prize winners are racists (which, even if the winners' racism had anything to do with the selection committee, would still need to be demonstrated to influence their decisions - you can't just make this assumption).

The Nobel prize was awarded to Francis, Crick, and Wilkins because Franklin died before it was awarded. Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously. She was never nominated because the field hadn't corroborated Francis, Crick, and Wilkins results until a few years later. End of story. Actually not end of story; Francis, Crick and Wilson still made huge contributions that Franklin did not; what Franklin showed in her presentation solved the structure in their minds, not hers. Yes, her work was very important - critical, even. But it's not like Francis/Crick/Wilkins just stole her data and published it as their own. That's a total mischaracterization of the events that took place.

Moving on. The difference between first author and second author is big. If your name appears first, it's your work. Therefore it is unsurprising to me that the second-name author of a prize-winning paper was not nominated for a Nobel prize. But it's not only unsurprising; it also makes sense. That isn't sexism. That's how authorship works in biology.

Next, you cite statistics on female Nobel prize winners. I would like to remind you that unequal outcomes are not equivalent to unequal opportunities. Simple fallacy. Also, the fact that most prizewinners are of European descent is indicative of circumstantial advantages in technology.

Next, more statistics. So I will answer with some of my own. 30% of physics PhDs are female; 70% of psychology PhDs are female.



This will skew outcomes.

Holy shit, I just read this:

Diversity quotas are meritocracy in action

And I think I'm going to have to stop here because I can't argue with someone who makes statements like that. Hilarious. But also worrisome. You should get your head checked.

[Geschan]

I would actually think another good idea is to award noble prizes for science not scientists and many people have been arguing for this as well that is to award the prizes to groups of researches including everyone who contributed to the prize wining work in lieu of just 3 scientists (usually old white men).

That is single meaningful sentence in the whole post. The way research is conducted somewhat changed. Research isn't conducted by single individuals anymore but rather by research groups that should be nominated as a whole and not only the leader of the group.

The rest is quite frankly meaningless. There is no barrier that stops women from going into stem fields.
Missing role models aren't the problem either. If you have a talent for stem, nothing is stopping you.

Diversity quotas are meritocracy in action.

Just... no. They are the bloody opposite. Diversity quotas are only enforcing diversity. Otherwise they would be merit quotas.

[Kuntantee]

I can't talk for Nobel Prices, but I can for sure predict that women percentage winning Turing medal will be remaining quite low in future. They simply do not prefer enrolling to a CS/EE/CE program.

[Eviscero]

What is preventing female scientists from making breakthroughs?
Almost every scientific achievement in history was thanks to males.

Systemic bias. I guess you are ignorant of the fact that woman were barred from earning advanced degrees at many institutions and have been heavily discouraged until only recently.

But you're right, those lazy whiney women shoulda just taught themselves and made them breakthroughs in between baking cookies and changing diapers.

Tldr: you're an idiot.

[Harbour]

How about to give nobel prize to female scientists when they do more valuable scientific breakthroughs than male scientists?
When it comes to science there is no place for SJW bullshit. Facts and results matter here.
And ofc, the idea of quotas specifically for females is the sexism itself. If i was female i would feel myself offended when someone decides that i deserve the prize because I'm female.

[Jinpachi]

Nobel prize system has a long history in sexism and racism so I am not surprised that there is a lack of diversity even in 2017. This is why I have always been an avid supporter of social quotas whether it's aimed at getting more diversity in a business, university or even a hospital. The benefits of diversity outweigh the negative side effects of quotas. Women and black/minority ethnic people deserve a chance to work in cutting edge research but first they need to be put in positions which allow them to contribute Nobel prize worthy academic work.


Now that I said that queue all the sexist (and racist) posters which will accuse women and PoC that they are not good enough and tell them to stop playing the victim.

The Nobel prize system does not have a long history in sexism and racism so I am surprised that there's anyone bitching about diversity in 2017. This is why I have always been an avid supporter of a meritocracy over quotas as they put outcome over effort. There are no real benefits to diversity for diversity's sake. People are free to work as hard as they like in their chosen field, and the work is what is important, not the fucking prize. Now queue all the worthless SJW's whining about not having a place on the podium when they didn't win the game.

[Deleted]

I guess you are ignorant of the fact that woman were barred from earning advanced degrees at many institutions

Of course. The evil patriarch conspiracy has forbidden women from becoming scientists.
Tldr: you're an idiot.

[Total Crica]

1. Women are better off at home raising children anyway.
2. The gender gap is caused by women's choices of majors.

1) Nah, the men are, that way no more wars for them to go die in, no more worrying about how they are going to keep the women happy!

2) Wonder why they make those choices? Oh, right, because many were raised to make those choices. It's slowly dying out to raise women to only make those choices, however.

[Eviscero]

Of course. The evil patriarch conspiracy has forbidden women from becoming scientists. Tldr: you're an idiot.

I don't know how much of a 'conspiracy' it was. More like a well documented, openly acknowledged, vigorously defended, status quo.
Of course I am referring to a time in the not-so-distant past, prior to legal protections against this sort of discrimination. The effects are still being felt.

[Grimbold21]

October 7th
November 1st

Hm....

[Deleted]

Maybe women should up their game in the scientific field. If men are winning because they are better, they I would say they are winning deservedly.

[Crissi]

This is just a gender thread

Closing