Are There Only Ten Females Won Nobel Prize In Physics Or Medicine?

[candy-swift_1]

I read a blog post(http://www.creative-biolabs.com/blog/index.php/90/) about females wining Nobel Prize in Physics or Medicine. It said that there are only ten females have won a pricze in the whole history. Is that for real?

[Svejk]

9 of them had clever husbands. (I expect)

[1ozzy]

That wasn't very noble Svejk.

[Mamyalynne]

If you doubt the veracity of the blog,check elsewhere. There is an official Nobel site.

[ummmm]

Naughty, Svejk, naughty!

[fiction-factory]

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/women.html

[fiction-factory]

You can count the numbers of males and females on here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates

[Peter Pedant]

yeah looks about right

in schweik's vein Marie Curie mustve had a bright husband and children

she is in a twice winner category ( physics and chem )
and mother and child pair ( Marie C and Irene Joliot-C )

Boobs McClintock ( jumping chromosomes - transposons ) only got because she lived so long

Lise Meisner neva got it

jocelyn Bell Burnell found the first quasar and her supervisor got the Nobel Prize
her modest comment was - I havent had a bad career as the woman who should have got the Nobel Prize
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jocelyn_Bell_Burnell

[wildwood]

The Nobel prize has been going for a long time and in yer olden days many women were not readily accepted in scientific and 'learned' Society circles. As Society got more civilised, the number of female winners have incrementally increased with time.

[Peter Pedant]

that is what candy must be complaining about

it is incremental and not exponential

[Peter Pedant]

I mean yeah Girton College Cge only opened in 1867 ....

[douglas9401]

I am woman, hear me roar.

I am wimmin, hear me whine and grizzle about how it's soooooo unfair and somebody should doooo something cos it's just so, well, unfair.

[pastafreak]

Did anyone actually say that,douglas?
Maybe we should return to the days when "wimmin" were property...oh,and considered not to have the same brain capacity as their menfolk...not that long ago really.

[douglas9401]

My superior male brain saw it in the tone of the question from the poor, downtrodden poster, pastafreak.

I could be wrong of course, I'll check with the lads. :-P

[pastafreak]

If you buy the lads a pint,I'm sure they will agree with you. ;-)

[douglas9401]

:-)

[jim360]

One has to allow for a lot of factors in analysing that massive discrepancy. Firstly, women in Science were very rare for a long time. Secondly, even the ones who did make it were often somewhat looked down on by their colleagues (not always, but certainly officially they would often find it difficult).

A lot of this has changed now, but then thirdly: Nobel prizes tend to have a bit of lag before they are awarded for work from a long time ago, eg Peter Higgs and Francois Englert won their awards for work done during the 1960s. That lag affects everyone but then women in science in the 1960s were also rare. Fourthly, the awards committee has traditionally shown a bias in favour of the people who were officially in charge of the work, even if they didn't actually do the work itself. This hit Jocelyn Bell Burnell, but has affected plenty of other men as well who missed out in favour of their more senior collaborators. There have been various other controversies in the history of the prize, eg the 1923 prize for work on insulin that went to the head of the lab where the work was done, John McLeod, while (some of) the people who did the work were omitted (Charles Best and James Collip).

Essentially Jocelyn Bell was the victim of bias against PhD students, rather than a bias against women necessarily, and the whole picture demonstrates the historical difficulty women have had in being able to progress very far in science. It's unlikely that the balance between male and female winners of the Nobel Prize will ever be perfectly redressed, although in future you'd expect the ratio of men: women winning the prize to tend towards 1:1. But then it shouldn't be artificially redressed. I significant contribution to science should be the only criterion for winning the award.

[Svejk]

^And being black, waycist.