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More women than ever before are staying in STEM and earning faculty positions, but structural barriers and biases still shut them out of top awards, explains Mary K. Feeney, professor of ethics and public affairs, and the associate director of the Center for Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy Studies at Arizona State University.
All of the 2019 Nobel Prizes in science were awarded to men.
That’s a return to business as usual, after biochemical engineer Frances Arnold won in 2018, for chemistry, and Donna Strickland received the 2018 Nobel Prize in physics.
Strickland was only the third female physicist to get a Nobel, following Marie Curie in 1903 and Maria Goeppert-Mayer 60 years later. When asked how that felt, she noted that at first it was surprising to realize so few women had won the award: “But, I mean, I do live in a world of mostly men, so seeing mostly men doesn’t really ever surprise me either.”
The rarity of female Nobel laureates raises questions about women’s exclusion from education and careers in science. Female researchers have come a long way over the past century. But there’s overwhelming evidence that women remain underrepresented in the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math...
All of us — the general public, the media, university employees, students, and professors — have ideas of what a scientist and a Nobel Prize winner looks like. That image is predominantly male, white, and older — which makes sense given 97 percent of the science Nobel Prize winners have been men.
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Source: Undark Magazine
