How many women have received a Nobel Prize throughout history?

A total of 12 men have been awarded in 2021, while only one woman has received a Nobel Prize this year. This is Maria Ressa, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize together with Dmitry Muratov.

The two journalists they have been honored “for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression.” In the Philippines and Russia, respectively.

How many women have received a Nobel Prize throughout history?

The following graph, made with data from the Nobel Foundation, shows that the women remain underrepresented as Nobel laureates. Although their number among the winners has been increasing.

Between 1902 and 1921 only 4.1% of the laureates were women, while that figure was 12.4% between 2002 and 2021.

The Nobel Prizes began to be awarded in 1901 in the categories of Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or MedicineLiterature and Peace. In 1969, the Science Prize was awarded for the first time. Economics of the Bank of Sweden in Memory of Alfred Nobel, popularly known as the Nobel Prize in Economics.

In these 120 years of existence, this award has been awarded 887 times to men and 59 to women (25 in Science categories —which includes Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine and Economics— and 34 in Literature and Peace). Marie Curie, who received it twice, was the first woman to win it, in the Physics category in 1903.

The Nobel Prizes in science

We give below the list of Nobel Prizes awarded in scientific disciplinessharing the discipline, the year and the reason why it was awarded.

They are arranged in chronological order of assignment. There are 21, although there are 22 women who have received them on 23 occasions.

1. Physics (1903): “for investigations into the phenomena of radiation discovered by Henri Becquerel.”
2. Chemistry (1911): “for the discovery of radium and polonium, the isolation of radium, and the study of the nature and compounds of this chemical element.”
3. Chemistry (1935): “for their syntheses of radioactive elements.”
4. Physiology or Medicine (1947): “for his discovery of the mechanism of catalytic conversion of glycogen.”
5. Physics (1963): “for discoveries relating to the nuclear shell structure.”
6. Chemistry (1964): “for his determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biomedical substances.”
7. Physiology or Medicine (1977): “for the development of peptide hormone radioimmunoassays”.
8. Physiology or Medicine (1983): “for his discovery of mobile genetic elements”
9. Physiology or Medicine (1986): “for his discoveries of growth factors.”
10. Physiology or Medicine (1988): “for his discoveries of important principles in drug therapy.”
11. Physiology or Medicine (1995): “for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of the early stages of embryonic development.”
12. Physiology or Medicine (2004): “for his discoveries of the olfactory receptors and the organization of the olfactory system.”
13. Physiology or Medicine (2008): “for the discovery of the human immunodeficiency virus.”
14. Physiology or Medicine (2009): “for the discovery of the enzyme telomerase and how chromosomes are protected by telomeres.”
    Chemistry (2009): “for his studies on the structure and function of the ribosome.”
15. Physiology or Medicine (2014): “for their discoveries of cells constituting a positioning system in the brain.”
16. Physiology or Medicine (2015): “for their discoveries concerning a new therapy against malaria”.
17. Physics (2018): “for the revolutionary contributions in the field of laser physics, the use of optical tweezers and their application in biological systems”.
18. Chemistry (2018): “for the directed (engineered) evolution of enzymes.”
19. Physics (2020): “for the discovery that the formation of black holes is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity and for the discovery of a supermassive compact object in the center of our galaxy.”
20. Chemistry (2020): “for the development of a method for gene editing”.

Related Notes:

Why should you do a medical residency in Mexico?

This is how doctors can prescribe narcotics

GRAPH: Confirmed cases of the new omicron variant by country