On Monday, Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede anxiously watched from her home computer as the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was announced. As a scientist on the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, she knew an all-men slate of physics and chemistry laureates would be announced in the coming days, pending a final vote by members of the Nobel Academy. But she didn’t know who had been chosen for the Nobel that is awarded first.
When the names were announced—Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, who did pioneering work on microRNA in the 1990s—she realized men had once again swept the three science Nobels for the 12th time in the past 20 years—and that questions about diversity would surely come up. “Oh, my God,” Wittung-Stafshede, a biophysical chemist at Chalmers University of Technology who has pushed for diversifying the Nobel laureates, recalls thinking.
It’s not uncommon for the science Nobels to lack gender diversity. “The data suggest that for the best chance of a prize, you should identify as a man,” Nature wrote last week in a story that illuminated the typical profile of over a century of Nobel laureates.
In 2018, the Nobel committees began to make changes to their selection process to seek more nominations from women and researchers outside North America and Europe. Committee members say the new procedures have begun to move the needle: Thomas Perlmann, secretary of the Nobel Committee for Physiology or Medicine and a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute, told ScienceInsider 19% of the nominees for this year’s prize were women, up from 13% in 2021 and 5% in 2015.
The chemistry and physics committees declined to share similar numbers. “While we have seen improvements in the diversity of the nomination pool, the changes from year to year are relatively small,” wrote Peter Brzezinski, a biochemist at Stockholm University and secretary of the chemistry committee. But the pool of scientists who are invited to submit nominations for the chemistry Nobel now includes 43% women, he said.
Members of those three committees say the panels communicate with one another to a certain extent—for instance, in the spring, the chemistry and physics committees met to discuss whether they had any overlapping candidates. But their final decisions are made independently. Wittung-Stafshede thinks the committees could talk more in advance. “I have proposed that. … We could say, ‘How does the overall slate of suggested laureates look like?’”
