Women Break Ground with Nobel Prizes

Each year, the Nobel Prize is awarded to people who’ve made outstanding contributions in areas like chemistry, physics, medicine, literature, economics, and peace.You’ve probably heard a lot about the Nobel Prize in the past week, especially after President Barack Obama surprised many people around the world by being awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.

But President Obama isn’t the only Nobel Laureate making news. In fact, five other winners are getting a lot of attention, in part because they’re women. And that’s the largest number of women to win the prize in a single year. Here’s a look at the women who won:

• Ada E. Yonath – Chemistry – “For studies of the structure and function of the ribosomes”
• Elizabeth Blackburn & Carol Greider – Medicine – “For the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase”
• Herta Muller – Literature – “Who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed”
• Elinor Ostrom – Economics – “For her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons”

The other night I heard a story on NPR about Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics, and some of the story focused on the fact that she is the first woman to ever win the prize for economics. The next night, the same news show on NPR mentioned that they received a lot of emails from listeners complaining that the original news story should have spent less time focusing on the fact that she was a woman, and more time focusing on her actual accomplishments in the field.

I can understand where these listeners are coming from. In an ideal world, a woman winning a major international award for economics wouldn’t be seen as unusual at all. But this isn’t an ideal world. This is a world where men dominate in careers in math, science, technology and engineering, in part because there aren’t many role models for young women to look up to.

Says prize winner Carol Greider in an interview for the New York Times about women in the field of science: “There’s still a slight cultural bias for men to help men…It’s not that they are biased against women or want to hurt them. They just don’t think of them. And they often feel more comfortable promoting their male colleagues.”

I say, let’s celebrate Elinor Ostrow’s accomplishment and that of all the women who won prizes this year as loud as we can! For they all made a major contribution in paving the way for girls and young women to pursue their future dreams and know that they really can come true.

What do you think? Should the gender of the winners be considered part of the news story? For more on this topic, go over to Jezebel.