Besides Gabriela Mistral, how many women have won a Nobel Prize

In nearly 121 years of history, the Nobel Prize it has been awarded to less than a thousand people around the world; However, the great minority of them has been for the women; among which stand out Marie Curie and Gabriela Mistral, who was the first Ibero-American woman and the second Latin-American person to receive one of these awards.

The iconic Nobel Prize it began to be delivered in 1901, according to the will of Alfred Nobel, who had died five years earlier. It began with the categories of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace. It was until 1969 that the economics award was added.

Two years after the first edition, a woman finally gave the thank you speech after receiving the award; It was the year 1903, and the protagonist Marie Curie; since then more than 50 women have been awarded in the different categories of the Nobel Prize.

In these 120 years of existence, the Nobel Prize It has been awarded 887 times to men and 59 to women: 25 in Science categories, which includes Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine and Economics, as well as 34 in Literature and Peace.

Although there is still a long way to go to gender parity, it is true that in recent years the number of women awarded has increased.

Probably one of the most prominent scientists in this small list is

Marie Curie
; the Polish nationalized French, whose real name was Maria Salomea Skłodowska.

He was also the first person to obtain the Nobel Prize in two different sections. First in 1903, the Nobel Prize in Physics with her husband Pierre Curie and the physicist Henri Becquerel, “for their joint research on radiation phenomena.” The second eight years later, in 1911, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry “for the discovery of the elements radium and polonium, the isolation of radium and the study of the nature and compounds of this element.”

From that date, it was necessary to wait until 1935 to see another scientist under the applause of the Swedish Academy, she was Irène Joliot-Curie in Chemistry, the daughter of Marie Curie.

From then on, the awards to women in the field of hard sciences they continued to trickle down, in Chemistry they continued Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (1964), Ada Yonath (2009), Frances Arnold (2018),

Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna
(2020).

While in Medicine, the Swedish Academy has recognized Gerty Theresa Cori (1947), Rosalyn Sussman Yalow (1977), Barbara McClintock (1983), Rita Levi-Montalcini (1986), Gertrude B. Elion (1988), Christiane Nüsslein -Volhard (1995), Linda Buck (2004), Françoise Barré-Sinoussi (2008), Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider (2009), May-Britt Moser (2014) and Tu Youyou (2015).

And where least women They have highlighted is the Nobel Prize Physics that has only been for Maria Goeppert-Mayer (1963), Donna Strickland (2018), Andrea M. Ghez (2020); as well as that of Economy, where the winners are Elinor Ostrom (2009) and Esther Duflo (2019).

The first of all was Bertha von Suttner, who in 1905 was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her activism against the militarism of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. While the first writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature was Selma Lagerlöf from Sweden in 1909.

As in the case of female scientists, in these categories the recognition of women it has been scarce and dispersed.

In Literature Grazia Deledda (1926), Sigrid Undset (1928), Pearl S. Buck (1938), the Chilean

Gabriela Mistral
(1945), which by the way is the only Latin American, Nelly Sachs (1966), Nadine Gordimer (1991), Toni Morrison (1993), Wisława Szymborska (1996), Elfriede Jelinek (2004), Doris Lessing (2007), Herta Müller (2009), Alice Munro (2013), Svetlana Aleksiévich (2015), Olga Tokarczuk (2018) and Louise Glück (2020).

While in the Nobel Peace Prize is Jame Addams (1931), Emily Greene Balch (1946), Betty Williams (1976), Mairead Maguire (1997), Alva Myrdal (1982), Jody Williams (1997), Shirin Ebadi (2003 ), Wangari Maathai (2004), Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkul Karman (2011), Nadia Murad (2018) and Maria Ressa (2021).

Between the women who have undoubtedly stood out for their work are Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1979); the former president of Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi (1991); the Guatemalan Rigoberta Menchú (1992); and Pakistani Malala Yousafzai (2014), who has been the youngest person to obtain a

Nobel Prize
, I was 17 years old at the time.

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