Prizes are the lifeblood of science, but the gender of the person they are named after can have a big impact on who is likely to receive that award. That’s the conclusion of a new study carried out by researchers at the University of Birmingham in the UK, who have found that men win almost 80% of awards named after male scientists. The finding, they say, could be affecting career progression for women in science (Nat. Hum. Behav. doi:10.1038/s41562-023-01773-9).
Historically, science has overlooked women’s contributions while rewarding men. Chien-Shiung Wu, for example, carried out experiments that helped disprove the law of conservation of parity, but it was her male colleagues – Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-Dao Lee – who were awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Physics for their theoretical work. Astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell, meanwhile, missed out on a Nobel prize for the discovery of pulsars, which went to her PhD supervisor Antony Hewish.
To investigate the underrepresentation of women in scientific awards, Katja Gehmlich and Stefan Krause have now examined the 9000 recipients of 346 prizes and medals across all disciplines of science. Men scooped most prizes, making up 84.6% of awardees, with women accounting for just 15.4% of awardees, on average. But the authors discovered a striking gender difference in this proportion, which depends on who the prizes were named after.
Women, the study finds, comprise only 12% of the recipients of prizes named after male scientists, but they do much better at winning prizes named after female scientsits, accouting for 47% of awardees. When a prize is named after both a man and a woman, the average fraction of women is 32%. For awards that are not named after individuals, such as the Breakthrough Prize, for example, women make up 24% of awardees.
Award bias
The study considers several explanations for the findings, such as women being less likely to self-nominate or to encourage their peers to nominate them for a prize, especially if there are few women among its previous winners. Since scientists have been found to preferentially nominate colleagues of the same gender as themselves, the smaller proportion of women in senior scientific roles could contribute to a lower nomination rate for women.
Another factor could be bias among award committees, which could be self-perpetuating. “If nomination committees are made up of former awardees, so have a higher percentage of men, this can lead to unconscious gender bias in nomination and selection processes,” Gehmlich and Krause told Physics World in a joint e-mail.
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The study’s proposals for addressing underrepresentation include diversifying award panels and counteracting bias by raising awareness of the effect that the names of awards can have. They also suggest reducing perceived stigma around self-nomination and changing nomination criteria to ensure that individuals with caring responsibilities are not penalized.
Beyond the importance of fair recognition, the authors point out that prizes are an essential aspect of career progression within academia. “They represent important esteem indicators that are of relevance for hiring, academic promotions and tenure processes,” Gehmlich and Krause say.
The pair highlight the importance of access to data for researching other potential inequalities in academic awards. “We suggest collection and publication of anonymized nomination data by prize awarding committees to identify areas of imbalance,” they add.
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- Source: https://physicsworld.com/a/only-12-of-prize-recipients-for-awards-named-after-male-scientists-are-women-finds-study/
