Nessa Carey

This is natural. Most Nobel awards are given for discoveries made decades before... At a time when women were essentially absent from science (with very notable exceptions). This graph should change in the next decades. Hopefully.

The American Chemical Society has a play called No Belles about all the women who deserved Nobel prizes. It’s playing in the Bay Area on Oct 12 and 13, and might have other shows elsewhere!

It's only "bad" if some groundbreaking work was overlooked. The prize is for the work, not the person.

If that were true, why is the number of people for each prize restricted?

Um...same reason there's only one winner of a foot race? That's how competition works.

In which case it’s the people.

I’m curious: what’s the ratio of women in science/academic work? Lets say 1/20... then why expect to get a 1/1 ratio in anything? I’m a woman in a very male-dominated fiel in a male-dominated country; and I wouldn’t like to be awarded for “being a woman”, but for being the best

Depends on the field but usually well above the 3% here. No one is suggesting awards for being a woman. We are suggesting not being disadvantaged by being a woman and this applies at every career stage.

The sort of people who think the Nobel prize should be gender balanced are the sort of people who would never win a Nobel prize.

As are the sort of people who resist calls for a society in which there is equality of opportunity and of recognition.

Equality of opportunity is contradictory to equality of recognition. People being different, even at population group level, they will not do the same things if given the same opportunities. They will thus not achieve the same results & recognition.

No, it is not. I mean, you literally just explained it yourself. You can have equality of opportunity and different people will still do different things, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't have the same chances - in this case, they clearly don't.

I made a distinction "equality of recognition", doesn't mean equality of chance but of result. Given that we are under a graph of the gender breakdown of the highest academic achievement, there is no other interpretation possible of (implicitly asking for) "=ity of recognition".

It would be interesting to see the stats for nominations and people who never got it despite multiple nominations. There is also a massive issue with the Nobel committees in terms of internationalization.

Lise Meitner. Nominated 48 times. Never won. https://www.nobelprize.org/nomination/redirector/?redir=archive/show_people.php&id=6097 …

Rosalind Franklin may be an even more outrageous example..in particular given some of the appalling actions/statements from Watson.