Why and How women get fewer Nobel Prizes: know shocking facts on Nobel Prize

The 2022 Nobel Prizes are being declared even as I write and so far Carolyn Bertozzi is the only woman to feature in this prestigious company. She has shared the 2022 Chemistry Nobel Prize with 2 other male scientists namely Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal. To surprise many among us, Bertozzi is only the eighth woman to win the chemistry prize in Nobel history.

Women traditionally have always been under-represented at the Nobels, even more so in the Science Categories. Though women are more-represented in science education and research today than decades ago, they still undergo opportunity bias, gender challenges, obtain lower pay, and are given fewer prizes than their male counterparts.

Let's take this debate a little forward by knowing women who have done their country and family proud by making it to the winners' list.

List of Women recipient of Chemistry Nobel Prize

• Marie Curie (1903)
• Irène Joliot Curie - daughter of Marie Curie - in the year 1935
• Dorothy Hodgkin (1964)
• Ada Yonath (2009)
• Frances Arnold (2018)
• Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna (2020)
• Carolyn R. Bertozzi (2022)

In all of the 20th century, only 3 women received the Chemistry Nobel

All the data given below is true till the Nobel Prize 2021. Some minute changes can appear once all the 2022 Nobels are announced.

Shocking facts on Nobel Prizes, and their bias towards women

• Nobel Prizes are often criticised - and rightly so for being biased - as Nobel recipients overwhelmingly happen to be white, male, and American.
• About 40 per cent of all the Nobel prizes - 400 of the total 900 - have gone to citizens of just one country: USA
• Fewer than three per cent of Nobel science winners are women, and only one woman of colour has ever received the award
• That lucky Black woman is Toni Morrison, whose book "Beloved" earned her the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award as well, is so far the only woman of colour to receive the Nobel Prize (Literature) in History.
• Of all 972 Nobel recipients, only 58 women have won the prize.
• Women's representation in different categories of Nobel Prizes
• The 118 literature awardees include 16 women,
• 17 of the 135 peace prize recipients are women.
• The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has gone to 12 women out of the 224 total winners,
• The Chemistry Prize only has 8 women recipients out of the total 191 laureates.
• Just four women have won the Nobel Prize in Physics out of the total 219 laureates since 1901.
• Marie Curie was the first woman to receive a Nobel Prize ever. She did it way back in 1903 for her study of spontaneous radiation. She, however, had to share the award with her husband.
• 8 years later in 1911, she finally did it alone by being the sole winner of the chemistry prize for her pioneering work on radioactivity.
• In total, there are only 3 women in history - the other two are geneticist Barbara McClintock and chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin - to be the sole recipient of the Nobel Prize.

Other Discriminated Groups

• Of the 972 individuals and organisations who have earned Nobel prizes, just 16 are Black.
• In the 120-year history of the Nobel Prize, no Black person, regardless of gender, has ever won a prize in the Science category.