I just noticed that five women - yep, read it, FIVE - won Nobel Prizes this year. According to Wikipedia, of all the Nobel Prizes ever awarded, 765 have been to men and 41 have been to women*.. dismal, I know, but 2009 easily holds the record for most Nobels awarded to women in one year. In 2004, there were three, and in all other years there were 2, 1, or 0. How's that for some progress?

Here are our winners:

Elizabeth Blackburn & Carol W. Greider (with Jack W. Szostak), Physiology/Medicine

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/science/06nobel.html?scp=3&sq=nobel%20prize%20medicine&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/science/13conv.html

Ada E. Yonath (with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz), Chemistry

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/08/science/08nobel.html?hpw

Herta Müller , Literature

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/books/09nobel.html

Elinor Ostrom (with Olver E. Williamson), Economics

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/13/business/economy/13nobel.html

And to pull it all together, an article from the Financial Times (the only one I've come across) pointing out our record-breaking year:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1de7d7f2-b752-11de-9812-00144feab49a.html

And a fun chart from Wikipedia (I like charts).

*I've seen variations on this statistic, but the basic proportion stays the same, depending on who's counting.

Congratulations, Ladies! I'm sure we'll be seeing much more progress on the Nobel front in the future.

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5 Comments

October 14, 2009 12:49 PM

[0+]  nobody said:

So ironic that not only did this year have about 1/8 or so of all women Nobel prize winners but that only one of the winners was from a stereotypically acceptable field for women, the rest were in science and economics.

But this is some awesome news. I am pretty glad about it; I hope some day everything will be leveled out so that men and women will be awarded equally.

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October 14, 2009 5:00 PM

[0+]  Canlord2 said:

How about it's because they god damn deserved it, you fucking retards, and not because of some fucking lifting of the god damn conspiracy you arrogant assholes.

I hate feminism.

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October 14, 2009 5:52 PM

[0+]  nobody replied to Canlord2 :

That totally makes god damn sense, since ~5% of Nobel prize winners were female, and since 5% of the world's population is female.

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October 14, 2009 8:28 PM

[0+]  CaroJ replied to Canlord2 :

Soooooo... if you hate feminism, why are you commenting on a feminist website, you f*ing retard? Did you wander in here by mistake and can't figure how to get out?

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October 14, 2009 8:40 PM

[0+]  bethan said:

Minor point: the its really the Nobel memorial prize in economics, not one of the original prizes set up by Alfred Nobel in 1901, but was et up quite a bit later (can't remember when offhand). Best to keep in mind when looking at that graph.

You do start to see a definate increase after 1970, which to me would seem to be correlated with before the 1950s a lot of women would have had significantly less access to university.

The other thng to consider is it really is an international award. In some countries things are pretty good for woman's education, but other countries where things are very difficult for women are considered. This will skew the results to fewer women even when some countries are very equal.

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