For some time there have been complaints that there has not been “equity” in Nobel Prizes: that too few women and people of color have won them. These inequities could result from several causes, or a combination of causes, but the one that’s always touted by those who complain is existing structural bias and discrimination. (See this article in Nature for such indictments by two powerful women in science, though it doesn’t mention the Nobels.) The equation of inequities in representation with ongoing bias is a pillar of Ibram Kendi’s ideas on anti-racism.
But there are two other reasons besides structural bias in science. One is that the dearth of women and people of color reflects past discrimination, so that only now, with biases diminishing towards zero, women and people are color are entering the pipeline to achievement—but haven’t yet reached the stage of professional accomplishment that would garner a Nobel.
The last explanation is a difference in preference coupled with comparative advantage. It’s well known that, at least in some Western countries, women score as well as men on science achievement tests, and score better than men in reading. That is, women are better overall than men. This means that any lack of achievement of women scientists cannot be due to a comparative lack of scientific ability. Rather, researchers have suggested that women prefer going into the humanities because they are better at it, and want to do what they’re better at (“comparative advantage”). Alternatively it may be that STEM fields simply aren’t as attractive to women as to men. All of these are suggested in the BBC article. (I don’t know any such data on people of color, but of course in the U.S. black and Hispanics score lower than whites and Asians on tests of reading, math, and science.)
But let me quote from the BBC piece:
The head of the academy that awards the Nobel Prizes in science has said it will not introduce gender quotas.
Goran Hansson, head of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said they want people to win “because they made the most important discovery”.
Since its inception in 1901, 59 Nobel Prizes have gone to women. [JAC: There have been 975 prizes total. The 59 Prizes to women involve 58 women as Marie Curie won twice.]
Maria Ressa was the only woman honoured this year. Marie Curie was the first woman to get the prize – and remains the only woman to get it twice.
“It’s sad that there are so few women Nobel laureates and it reflects the unfair conditions in society, particularly in years past, but still existing. And there’s so much more to do,” Mr Hansson told the AFP news agency.
“We have decided we will not have quotas for gender or ethnicity,” he said, adding that the decision was “in line with the spirit of Alfred Nobel’s last will”.
“In the end, we will give the prize to those who are found the most worthy, those who have made the most important contributions,” he said.
I think that’s a fair decision. If they had decided to fulfill quotas, that would mean giving prizes not to those who make the most important contributions, but to help even out a disparity in sexes and races. So, for example, the 2020 Medicine and Physiology prize shared by Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna was an excellent choice (and one that cut out male competitors), for their work was highly important by anyone’s standards. Nobody can say that these women were chosen to achieve gender parity!
We’ll focus on gender, as we have more data on that, and this is the focus of the BBC article and most complaints about disparity in Nobels. It’s true that women haven’t received half of the Nobel Prizes over time, and this can be explained by all three factors above, but largely because, due to bias or oppression in the past, there simply weren’t that many women in science (or in literature). I think most of us recognize that this gender bias is disappearing rapidly; indeed, universities throughout the West are trying very hard to recruit women professor and students. But there’s still a disparity in STEM participation. This may or may not change much in the future (though it’s certainly changed during my lifetime!), but whether we’ll ever achieve gender parity in academic representation—or Nobel Prizes—is something I don’t know. All we can do, and must do, is offer everyone equal opportunity to enter the scientific pipeline, and avoid gender or racial discrimination within the pipe.
More from the BBC and Hansson:
And while more women are being recognised now compared to previous decades, Mr Hansson said, that number was increasing “from a very low level”.
“Keep in mind that only about 10% of the professors in natural sciences in western Europe or North America are women, and even lower if you go to East Asia,” he said.
However, the scientist said they would “make sure that we have an increasing portion of women scientists being invited to nominate, and we will continue to make sure we have women on our committees – but we need help, and society needs to help here”.
“We need different attitudes to women going into sciences… so that they get a chance to make these discoveries that are being awarded,” he added.
Again, the last statement implies structural bias against women, but where are the data that there are “different attitudes to women”? There is no consistent data showing discrimination against women in STEM hiring or grant-getting; in fact, one can cite research showing both sides. In the absence of consistent evidence, all we can do is avoid personal bias and offer equal opportunities. Note that Hansson also mentions the severe dearth of women in the natural sciences in Asia, Europe, and North America.
When Charpentier got her Prize, she hoped the award would encourage women to go into STEM, but she also noted a comparative lack of interest of women in going into STEM.
From the BBC again:
Last year, scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna became the first two women to share the honour when they were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the tools to edit DNA.
It was the first time any of the science prizes had been awarded to two women without a male collaborator also listed on the award.
At the time, Prof Charpentier said: “I wish that this will provide a positive message specifically for young girls who would like to follow the path of science… and to show them that women in science can also have an impact with the research they are performing.”
She added that there was “a clear lack of interest in following a scientific path, which is very worrying”.
I’ve given my position many times on this site. I favor some forms of affirmative action in academia for minorities, including women (they’re actually more numerous than men), though settling on how to structure that affirmative action is tricky. The affirmative action I have in mind involves accepting students in colleges and universities, and in hiring faculty. But these preferences should, I think, stop once someone is hired, and they should certainly not apply to awards and prizes. Thus I think the Nobel Committee’s statement is appropriate, though I’m not sure why they made it. Could it be that public pressure was bearing down on the Academy?
Again, all one can do in the face of the latter is to be sure that everyone is made aware of the excitement of science and then to avoid bias. As the following article states, we need to ensure equal opportunity, not equal outcome, for equal outcomes assumes that all groups have identical preferences or interests.
I love this photo of Doudna and Charpentier. I think this is in Stockholm when they got their prizes, but I can’t be sure. It does show some joint award, though, and the affection between the two women, who weren’t really collaborators but independent researchers.
There are those who think that there should be no affirmative action in any aspect of science—that hiring, promotion, funding, and awards in STEM be solely on the basis of merit. One of these is Lawrence Krauss, who wrote the following piece in a recent Quillette (click on screenshot to read):
Now Lawrence is talking about disparities between men and women in funding by NSERC in Canada and other countries, not in hiring or awards, but the principle he sets forth is one I agree with:
The standard of “fair access” that NSERC planners set out here implies a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between mandating equality of opportunity—which is desirable—and mandating equality of outcome. The latter would lead to overt identity-based discrimination against members of groups whose applications, in some cases, would otherwise be successful under a purely merit-based approach. That a major research-funding agency is promoting such a misunderstanding in regard to policy formulation is an issue of some concern.
Where I differ from Krauss is that I favor equality of opportunity above the college-admissions or academic-hiring level, but also some tweaking of outcomes (a bit of equity) to bump up minorities at both levels. Once people are hired, again, the affirmative action should stop. (It goes without saying that I don’t think grossly unqualified people should be admitted to college or hired for professor jobs, as that does nobody any favors.)
Krauss notes that the funding disparity between men and women in Canada (and Australia) is immediately imputed to systemic sexist bias at the present time, but gives data showing that the difference is explained completely by different career stages of grant applicants. At early stages, funding is roughly equal between men and women, but at senior stages men get more funding. But that’s solely because there are simply more men at senior stages of their careers. Here are the data of grants given in Australia and what Krauss says about them:
A bar chart included in a previous Nature article on this subject shows the total value of grants awarded to men and women in 2019, categorized by seniority quintile. In the first (most junior) quintile, women actually were awarded more grant money than men got. In the second quintile, men had a slight edge. This edge grew substantially in the third and fourth quintiles, leading up to a massive difference in the fifth (i.e., most senior) quintile, which shows the most senior male scientists being awarded $81 million, compared to just $21 million for the most senior female scientists. This means that, of the money going to senior scientists, women got just over 20 percent.
The caption: “Male (red) vs. Female (green) Investigator Grant recipients in 2019, by applicant seniority.”
Krauss’s analysis:
The latest Nature article concludes with a quote from Teresa Woodruff, an obstetrician and advocate for women in science at Northwestern University. She describes the data as a wake-up call to funders, who now should “address the issues.” But the Nature analysis glides over one of the more obvious issues lying in plain sight: As the 2019 article showed, there tends to be fewer senior women (just 17 in 2019) applying for grants, as compared to senior men (75). In 2021, the numbers were similar: According to Nature, “at the most senior level … there were about four times more male than female applicants”—an 80/20 male-female applicant split that corresponds almost exactly to the $81 million/$21 million split in awarded 2021 grants.
This pattern has an obvious explanation: There are simply more men than women in the senior ranks of Australia’s health and medical researchers—a fact that shouldn’t surprise anyone, since most scientific fields were, until just a few decades ago, almost entirely dominated by men. Thankfully, this era is over, and Australia’s medical schools achieved gender parity in admissions a long time ago. Thus, one might expect that the funding of male and female medical researchers at the junior level would be roughly even, while being progressively more skewed toward men among older generations—which is exactly what the data reported by Nature shows to be the case.
While this is the kind of data regularly adduced to show structural sexism in STEM, the explanation is not nearly as insidious.
Finally, Krauss makes a more general statement that goes beyond funding:
We have gone down this road before, when strict quotas were placed on Jewish scientists within my own academic sphere, physics, as a means of excluding Jews (including very nearly, future Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman) from US graduate schools. Today, we properly regard such policies as shameful, both for discriminating against individual human beings and for misdirecting society’s scientific resources. Medical science is a life-and-death endeavor, and decisions about how that science should be funded must be based on the quality of research proposals, not the skin color or sex of those submitting them.
The comparison with Jews isn’t really apposite, however, as Jews were discriminated against: the quotas were the maximum number of Jews allowed to be admitted. The minority group, in other words, was discriminated against. What Krauss is attacking here are quotas against the majority group that favor minority groups. (I suppose you could see this as a “male quota”).
And I still favor preferential admission and hiring of minorities (but not grossly preferential, is as happening in California) as a form of reparations for past discrimination and, as Charpentier noted, to provide some role models. Again, we should accept only qualified applicants, and any deficit in training can be addressed with mentoring or tutoring.
All applicants for jobs or admissions, however, should exceed some bar decided as “qualified for the slot”. What that means is above my pay grade, but surely far more qualified people apply to America’s best colleges than get into them.
I know the arguments against affirmative action, but I won’t try to counter them now.
I’m glad to learn all this – I am very pleased that Hansson and the committee he represents simply re-iterate (not “double-down”) the impetus for the Nobel Prize :
“… the most important discovery”
That is an enormous task, enough for one … organization. Hansson says it all the time. It is an idea that has to be meditated on :
Discovery
… it cannot be made into a checklist or put on a scoreboard. It is a profound thing to know.
The only Nobel prize I feel even a rudimentary competence to address is the one for Lit. And it seems to me, the Swedish Academy has made an effort to spread that one around. Just since 2010, it’s gone to authors from nine countries on six continents, including four women (not to mention a certain Jewish-American lyricist name o’ Zimmerman). 🙂
I’m late to the party, but your “o’Zimmerman” somehow reminded me of the Scottish clan MacLopez from that series whose humour not many seem to enjoy as much as I do : namely, Hamish Macbeth.
The MacLopez clan were the descendants of the lucky few who supposedly survived the supposed sinking of a Spanish Armada ship off the coast of northern Scotland, perhaps near Skye.
I realize your “o’ ” was a version of ‘of ‘, but initially couldn’t help imagining some persecuted bunch with Middle Eastern genealogy who somehow ended up in deepest, darkest Ireland, together with the re-named O’Cohens, etc.
Last summer, following the death of Steven Weinberg, Scott Aaronson wrote (on Shtetl-Optimized); “Steve also once told me that, when he was required to write a statement about what he would do to advance D.E.I., he submitted just a single sentence: ‘I will seek the best candidates, without regard to race or sex.’ ” Such a sensible and rational position would now be considered “controversial” by many.
Not only controversial: in the University of California system it would get your application tossed out at the very beginning.
Do you know how long ago Professor Weinberg submitted that single sentence? Whether then or now, it seems most if not all universities would be on the horns of a dilemma in deciding whether to hire/fire a Nobel laureate in response, their having a Nobellist in their stable being a matter of most significant cachet/status.
Steven Weinberg was not only the greatest living physicist (maybe even scientist), but also very strong-willed and outspoken. He opposed the concealed-carry-on-campus policy and said he would not tolerate it in his classrooms, even if he had to go to jail. He was an atheist and a supporter of Israel who objected to woke pro-Palestinian boycotts.
I’m pretty sure that he could be confident that the University of Texas (which he chose above other places generally regarded as more prestigious, and indeed he had worked at many of them) would not have disciplined him, as the PR would have been too bad. (He had tenure, so he couldn’t be fired.). My guess is that he put it that way to point out that everyone should be able to put it that way. His wife is a lawyer (and professor or law at UT).
Apparently apocryphal, but would have been nice if true: When negotiating his UT salary, he demanded one dollar less than the football coach. :-). He was paid pretty well (salary is on the web as it is a public university), but I think that the football coach earned more.
Worth pointing out the Nobels have never been awarded based solely on merit, nor will they ever be – unless one considers “being alive” to be a sign of merit. That is a non-merit criteria every candidate must fulfill.
You might think that’s a quibble, but it illustrates how the woke notion of checking ones’ assumptions or looking for sytemic bias has a bit of truth in it. We often gloss over or simply forget the non-merit criteria we put in selection systems, so yes it’s worthwhile to think critically about our systems and not just declare them ‘based on merit.’
I wouldn’t mind if the Nobels did something like the “Rooney Rule.” However trying to base the final award decision on merit (amongst living candidates) seems like the only rational way to go.
Indeed, the Nobel Prize is not big enough to contain all the greatest discoveries, such as those made by Hawking, critical contributions to great discoveries such as the work of Douglas Prasher, or those prior to 1901 (Nobel 10 December 1896, and I’m sure I saw it on that day’s Hili Dialogue).
[ https://www.nobelprize.org/alfred-nobel/alfred-nobels-will/ ]
It’s a will and the Prizes are rewarded for the discovery and not to the person.
Why it can’t be rewarded posthumously I don’t know, that seems to be something that was worked out by the Nobel Foundation that was set up according to the instructions in the will.
Around ten years ago, I saw an article in Time Out Bahrain about a Nobel Prize. Time Out said that no Bahraini had ever won, because the Nobel Prize was a Western Prize for Westerners (I believe those were the words). I suppose they did not stop to consider dozens of people in Japan who had won the Nobel prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_by_country
Krauss’ table of Australian grant funding stratified by career stage settles the issue definitively. For a different, typically woke analysis of this subject, we have:
https://theconversation.com/nobel-prizes-have-a-diversity-problem-even-worse-than-the-scientific-fields-they-honor-145799 . The writer was horrified to report that “There were no Black or female award recipients in physics, chemistry or medicine at the December 2019 Nobel ceremonies.”
This screed explains the paucity of minority physical scientists as follows: “Stereotype threat, in which negative stereotypes lead to academic underperformance, can kick in, as can impostor syndrome, when a person feels inadequate despite evident success. Blatant discrimination and numerous microaggressions can also prevent scientists from minority groups from performing to their potential.”
As for the sex difference in Nobels, the article’s deep analysis consists entirely of this: “It’s hard not to think that many distinguished and immensely qualified female scientists must have been overlooked over more than a century of prizes.”
Unlike this piece, Krauss’ table depends on the use of data. In regard to the Nobel issue, an even worse diversity problem is the complete lack of Nobel Prizes for work consisting of simple assertions (“stereotype threat…imposter syndrome…numerous microaggressions”) in place of data analysis. But, as we are often told, reliance on data is just another tool of the system of oppression. After the next Nobel ceremonies, we can expect articles denouncing the absence of prizes in Gender Studies, Critical Race Theory, Critical Cultural Studies, and (of course) Other Ways of Knowing.
The peculiar thing about that writing : the reader is somehow left to think the “successful” scientists suffer none of those problems – only the – whomever they mean in their piece suffer. In general, anyone who … doesn’t get prizes.
I believe I found the original interview with Agence France-Presse, put in Guardian earlier this year: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/12/nobel-prize-will-have-no-gender-or-ethnicity-quotas-academy-head-says .
My guess is that it was a response to the journalist posing a question.
The article ends in an ironic strawman:
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences is responsible for selecting the Nobel Laureates in Physics. They had their way 1903 and Marie Curie did receive the Nobel Prize in Physics 1903 (with Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie). It worked then and it may work now.
“By the terms of Alfred Nobel’s will the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences since 1901.”
[ https://www.nobelprize.org/about/royal-swedish-academy-of-sciences-physics/ ]
Glad to see this. There has always been some amount of ill tempered grumbling about the Nobel prize each year around the time the winners are announced. But I notice that the trend has grown in both volume and peevishness in recent years. Nice to see the Nobel committee respond with “Buzz off”.
For some reason, this reminds me of the days (not that long ago) when I was battling creationists on Amazon comments, and a particularly nasty creationist kept accusing me of only being where I was in my career because of affirmative action.
I repeatedly delighted in retorting that I was much too old for that to possibly be true.
“I favor equality of opportunity above the college-admissions or academic-hiring level, but also some tweaking of outcomes (a bit of equity) to bump up minorities at both levels.”
I don’t mean to disagree with our host, and I have tried to adopt this view. My university has pledged to hire at least 15 Black faculty members in the near future. Although we are in a part of Canada where historical and contemporary anti-Black racism is limited, and Black people represent only about 1% of the population in my province and <1% of students at the university.
But when I look around at the colleagues we're hired recently (none of them Black), and ask myself if our students would be better off if we had instead hired the most well-qualified Black person who applied for the job, the answer is universally "no". We hired the best person we could get, so that our students would have the best teachers and the best research advisors & mentors possible. That's the most important goal in all of this hiring. Certainly those Black applicants would have been better off if we had hired them instead (or at least I hope so, possibly they all got better jobs elsewhere), but our students would not have benefitted.
I'm sure in some cases the best applicant will also be the best Black applicant, and that's a win-win. But it seems inevitable that sometimes that won't be the case, and that a less capable or creative or industrious person will be hired in order to tweak or bump up the representation of a demographic group. That doesn't affect me too much, but it does affect our students, and I have a hard time getting over that cost.
Again I don't mean to tell our host that he's wrong. I appreciate the potential value of improving representation in this way. The cost of doing that seems high to me.
No problem. The issue is that you’ve set a quota, and one that may be way too high given the pipeline issue and possible dearth of “qualified” candidates. I wouldn’t set quotas like this, and, in the U.S., they are illegal under the Bakke decision.
Just as an aside, the Hugo Award was given to a woman for the sixth successive year, today. Having not read any of the winning novels, I can’t say whether it is a statistical anomaly or just a good run from female sci-fi authors.
I am shocked, shocked by the blatant sex ratio of the Hugo Award. The Award committee should immediately be required to undergo implicit association testing and anti-sexism training, or else resign. And if none of the women who received the Hugo Award these last six years was a trans woman, then the committee must of course be subjected to even more extensive training.
Thrilled to be reminded of the 2020 Nobel for Drs. Charpentier and Doudna. I have downloaded their photo. From the filename, and from the blue carpet, I think the event is the 2015 Princess of Asturias ceremony. This was one of many awards they have won together for CRISPR, including a Gairdner which often heralds Nobels.