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How To Increase the Number ofWomen Winning Nobel Prizes

By Meredith Wadman Oct. 24, 2013, Time

 

1. The mother of tweens was foldinglaundry at 5 a.m. before going to an early spinning class when the phonerang.  It was October 2009 and Carol Greider, a biologist atJohns HopkinsUniversity, picked up and heard a voice from Stockholm. She had won thatyear’s Nobel Prize in medicine.

 

2. Unfortunately, Greider remains ararity in the pantheon of Nobel scientists. And that’s partly because wehaven’t done enough to help young female scientists balance the demands ofacademic research with the pull of family  responsibility. That needs tochange.

 

3. Admittedly, today’s situation isbetter than it was when Greider entered grad school in the early 80s, nevermind in the dark days of the preceding decades. Then, when women were scarcelyto be found at undergraduate lab benches, the results in the rarefied reachesof Stockholm couldn’t help but be dismal. Since the awards were launched in1901, two physics laureates have been women: Marie Curie in 1903 and MariaGoeppert Mayer in1963.  In chemistry,four of the 165 winners have beenwomen. (Marie Curie was one of them, in 1911;she is the only woman to have wontwo Nobels.)  Women have won 5 percent of the coveted awards in physiologyor medicine.  And it was 2009 before Elinor Ostrom,of Indiana University and Arizona StateUniversity, became thefirst-ever female laureate in economics.

 

4. In fact, 2009 was something of abanner year for women — Greider shared her award with her mentor, ElizabethBlackburn, of the University ofCalifornia at San Francisco; and Israel’s AdaYonath shared the prize in chemistry. Since then, men have continued to sweepthe science awards.

 

To be a female Nobel winner has not onlyrequired brilliance, but also preternatural determination in the face ofcultural, social and political obstacles. The Italian neurologist RitaLevi-Montalcini secretly conducted experiments in her bedroom in Mussolini’sItaly. Francoise Barre-Sinoussi, the Parisian who co-discovered the AIDS virus– and whose father thought a women’s place was in the home –was in the lab onher wedding day. Her fiancé had to call her to remind her to turn up atthe ceremony. Barbara McClintock, the U.S.geneticist who won the prize in 1983,was nearly prevented from attending college by her mother. She was afraidhigher education would make her daughter unmarriageable.

 

5. All of this was decades ago, beforerecent campaigns to encourage more young women to choose STEM (science,technology, engineering and math) careers;and, in the US, before the CivilRights Act, affirmative action and Title IX.What’s the excuse in 2013?

 

6. What, specifically, shouldinstitutions do to offer such support?Universities can make meaningful policychanges, such as allowing women with young children to stop the tenure clockfor a period of time — an option available at some but not all academiccenters. They should ensure that young female scientists have dedicated,top-notch mentors. And they can guarantee paid maternity land parentalleave—something that’s woefully lacking for junior scientists at most U.S.institutions.

 

7. Federal agencies also have a roleto play. Big funders, led by theNational Institutes of Health (NIH) havealready implemented policies like no-cost grant extensions that allowscientists with family obligations extratime to complete a project, and othersthat allow fellowship periods to be extended or deferred for childcare purposes. But agencies can, and should, do more. One task the government is especiallysuited to is longitudinal data collection on those family-friendlypolicies.  Such data isn’t being collected systematically,and without itwe can’t know what policy changes are working, and which ones aren’t.

 

8. If we want top-drawer women to stayin science careers — and this country, beset by daunting, and growing, globalscience competition, could certainly use them – institutions of all stripesneed to show a far more serious commitment to supporting them.

 

9. To put it another way, if we wantto see more women celebrating inStockholm, we should strive to build a world inwhich the likes of Carol Greider are hardly ever to be found folding thelaundry at 5 in the morning.

 

Meredith Wadman is a Future Tense Fellow atNew America and an Oxford-educated physician. This article was written forthe New America Foundation’sWeeklyWonk.The views expressed are solely her own.