Timid steps forward for women in Nobel man's world

The Nobel prizes remain very much a man's world, especially in science, but with four female laureates named this year, women are slowly making their mark.

Since the first Nobel prizes were given out in 1901, 58 women have been rewarded, representing only 6.2 percent of the 934 laureates (excluding institutions) overall, according to an AFP database.

However, the number of women laureates has been steadily increasing over the decades, with 11.1 percent in the 2010s and 9.2 percent in the 2000s, against 5.4 percent in the 1900s and 2.6 percent in the 1910s.

Also Read | Americans Paul Milgrom, Robert Wilson win Nobel Prize in Economics

There were, however, none in the 1950s.

The latest additions to the Nobel club are America's Louise Gluck (the poet took the literature prize), Andrea Ghez (who shared physics) and Jennifer Doudna who won the chemistry award with France's Emmanuelle Charpentier.

The three women scientists have pulled off quite a feat in getting their prizes in two of the most male-dominated disciplines.

Also Read | Science Nobel prizes to women heartening

Doudna and Charpentier's chemistry win is only the third time in Nobel history that a woman or an all-female team have taken it, after Marie Curie and the British X-ray crystallography pioneer Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin won it on their own in 1911 and 1964 respectively.

As a Frenchwoman, Charpentier follows in the footsteps of Curie and her daughter Irene Joliot-Curie, who won the prize in 1935 in a tandem with her mother and husband Frederic Joliot.

Also Read | American poet Louise Glück wins Nobel Literature Prize

Marie Curie was the first woman laureate in 1903 in physics and is to date the only one to have won two Nobels (1903 in physics and 1911 in chemistry).

Women make up only 1.9 percent of physics laureates, or four out of 216, while they won seven out of 186 chemistry prizes.

The medicine and economics prizes are also heavily male dominated, with 5.4 percent of women laureates in medicine (12 out of 222) and 2.3 percent (two out of 86) in economics.

The Nobel peace prize (15.9 percent, or 17 out of 107), not taking into account those awarded to institutions, and literature (13.7 percent, 16 out of 117) are slightly more women friendly.

Like the prizes themselves, the Nobel committees awarding them are also male-dominated, with women holding less than a quarter of the places.

There are, for example, only two women among the seven members of the committee which selects the literature laureate, one out of seven for physics and four out of 18 for medicine.