Many women could have, and probably should have, been awarded a Nobel Prize in physics. The Guardian published a 2018 article titled “Five Women Who Missed Out on the Nobel Prize.”[23] Lise Meitner, who laid the groundwork for understanding nuclear fission, is my favorite of these. An element, meitnerium, was named for her posthumously. She is the only woman to have earned such an honor (curium is named after both Marie and Pierre Curie). But no Nobel. Both Lise Meitner and Jocelyn Bell, who discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967, missed the Nobels while their male collaborators, Otto Hahn (1944) and Anthony Hewish (1974), were each honored with an award. Lene Hau, a physicist at Harvard University, is another woman mentioned in the Guardian article. In 1999, her team was able to slow a beam of light to 17 meters per second, which she topped in 2001 by stopping a beam of light completely. This work has implications for quantum computing and quantum encryption. Hau’s work is fairly recent, so she may yet get a Nobel Prize.
There can be no denying that just three women in 213 physics Nobel laureates is a disproportionately low number and that many distinguished and immensely qualified female physicists must have been overlooked. But is this a big deal? Yes, of course it is. It is grossly unfair to the women who didn’t get the award and sends the wrong message to young people, funding agencies, editorial boards, and others about who does noteworthy science. Perhaps much more important, it is indicative of many biases and inequities that plague women and minorities in science.
In 2008, I served as a consultant for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ deliberations about the chemistry award; as a result, my wife and I were invited to attend the Nobel ceremonies. We stayed in the Grand Hotel with all the awardees. We got to see how scientists, excellent but unknown outside their fields, suddenly became superstars. They were interviewed on radio and television and hobnobbed with Swedish royalty. The events of Nobel week were shown live on Swedish television, and the newspapers were atwitter about the clothes worn by the Swedish princesses at the awards ceremony. Nobel laureates immediately become role models who are invited to give seminars all around the world. In an interview with Nature magazine, Donna Strickland, was asked how her life had changed since being informed that she had won the award. She said, “Oh, completely! This is just completely crazy, you know; I got to talk to the Prime Minister of Canada for the first time ever. He was very nice about it. I said, ‘This must be how your life is like all the time.’ And he replied, ‘No, I don’t always get to speak to a Nobel laureate.’”[24] Her answer shows the stature the prize imparts and why women Nobel laureates are such important role models.
Because only 3 percent of the science awardees have been women and there have been no black winners, there are very few role models for the new generation. The entertainment industry is no help; media depictions of male scientists and engineers outnumber those of women by a ratio of 14 to 1.[25] Frances Arnold, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for chemistry, had a guest appearance on The Big Bang Theory. She was the first woman scientist to make a guest appearance in 12 seasons of the show. If we want to solve our climate change problems, cure Alzheimer’s, expand our economies, and so forth, we can’t afford to completely ignore a large proportion of the population. In the words of Virginia Valian, who has spent the past 25 years studying the structural and psychological reasons for the paucity of women in the upper reaches of science, “If we want talent, we have to welcome it and nurture it, in all its diversity.”[26]
Nomination to receive a Nobel Prize in science or medicine is by invitation only. Each year, thousands of members of academies, university professors, scientists, previous Nobel laureates, members of parliamentary assemblies, and others are asked to submit candidates for the Nobel Prizes for the coming year. The names of the nominees and other information about the nominations cannot be revealed until 50 years later.[27] Despite this confidentiality, we know that nominations tend to favor scientists working at elite research institutions, famous scientists who are good at self-promotion and are well known to their peers. Predictably, these tend to be older, established white males. The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, for chemistry and physics, and the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute, for medicine, are in charge of selecting the Nobel winners from the nominations. They are aware that they have a “white male problem,” and starting with the 2019 nominations they have asked nominators to consider diversity in gender, geography, and topic in their future nominations. It didn’t work. There were no female awardees in physics, chemistry, or medicine at the December 2019 Nobel award ceremonies.
“The Leaky Pipeline”
The disproportionately low number of female Nobel laureates in the sciences and the absence of black science laureates is an extreme example of the “leaky pipeline” in science. The NSF coined the phrase for this phenomenon in the 1980s. It comes from a report in which the NSF also predicted an upcoming shortage of scientists and engineers that would grow to over 500,000 by 2006. The shortage never materialized, but the metaphor stuck. It presents a vivid visual image of women and people of color entering the sciences but then “leaking out of the pipeline” at greater rates than white males as they progress along their educational and career paths. This pipeline should lead to awards and board memberships in science, the ultimate being the Nobel Prizes, but the number of women and people of color consistently decreases as we move along the pipeline. More than 14,000 academic articles have been written about the “leaky pipeline.”[28] However, while the phrase is also very popular with the media and politicians, it is a flawed metaphor. Although it is often used in connection with a perceived future shortage of scientists, it is less commonly used to show the need for increased diversity and equitable representation in STEM, the more important pressing problem. At the same time, a leaky, dripping pipeline has the obvious negative connotations of a dysfunctional pipe; it implies that there is a single direct pathway from preschool to PhD, and that the PhD is a more valuable endpoint than other educational degrees.[29] Although the leaky pipeline is not necessarily a good metaphor, it certainly describes something real. Therefore, I use the phrase in this chapter, although I place it in quotes to acknowledge its inadequacy.
The percentages of women decrease from a bachelor’s degree to a PhD, tenure, full professorship, and major awards in the sciences. A 2015 NSF report shows that women accounted for 45 percent of PhDs in the STEM fields. The percentage falls to 42 percent for female junior faculty members and to 30 percent for female senior faculty members.[30] A similar drop-off is observed in biotech companies, where women just hold 20 percent of leadership roles and 10 percent of board seats. Chemistry & Engineering News reviewed the boards of 75 biotech companies that had raised series A funding since 2016 and found that 39 have only men on their boards, while just 2 have boards with over 30 percent women.[31]
There are numerous reasons for the decrease in the percentage of women in more senior positions and receiving major awards. The remainder of this chapter divides them into three main categories: (1) a structure (PhD, tenure, funding, and publication) that is not compatible with a family life; (2) implicit biases against women by other scientists (both men and women); and (3) a system that favors men and masculine confidence.
Science and a Family Life
The easy and convenient explanation for the low numbers of women in the upper levels of science is that they have more family responsibilities . Many will even argue that this is a fait accompli and that nothing can be done about it. I disagree. Some of the differences may be due to family reasons, but with proper incentives these differences can be made negligible, and there are other, more significant factors that cause women to exit the pipeline. If family issues are the only problem, why have the last 30–40 years seen such great improvements in gender diversity (and even racial diversity) in the life sciences, while the physical sciences, computer science, and engineering have lagged behind? Physics and astronomy require very similar skills, yet astronomy has twice the percentage of women faculty as physics.[32]
A study of gender diversity in the life sciences sector in Massachusetts was conducted by Liftstream and MassBio, in which