Bias against women and the Nobel Prize - Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg

By Joe Morina

 

After our discussion on Esther Lederberg, questions about women and the Nobel Prize were brought up.  Between 1901 and 2014 there were a total of 860 individuals who won the Nobel Prize/ Prize in Economic Sciences according to the Nobel Prize website. Out of 860 individuals, only 46 of them were women. Or, 95% of the awards have gone to men, while 5% have been awarded to women (Marie Curie won the award twice which means 47 total award to women, but only 46 individual women have been awarded).

Figure 1.  1901-2014 Nobel Prizes awarded to women.

Interestingly the Physics Nobel has not been awarded to women since 1963. Here is a list of women who would be prime candidates to win the Physics Nobel since. This list includes Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered the pulsar star. However, she will never receive that Noble Prize because in 1974 her graduate advisor and a colleague received the Nobel Prize in Physics for her discovery. In fact, only two women have ever won the Physics Nobel Prize (Marie Curie and Maria Mayer). Fortunately, 12 women have won the prize in medicine or physiology, suggesting that these fields present less gender discrimination than the male dominate realm of physics. Finally, most of the Nobel Prizes awarded to women have been in literature or the Noble Peace prize. The disproportionately low amount of Nobel Prizes awarded to women coupled with the discipline distribution of these Prizes highlights the gender inequalities inherent in our academic/scientific global community.

Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg is another Nobel candidate that will never win the prize. However her life’s work is not lost to the annuals of time. Her pioneering discoveries are still serving us today, and her work on the fertility factor changed our fundamental view on bacterial replication as well as molecular genetics (and even won her husband the Nobel!).

 

Figure 2. Joshua receiving the Nobel that Esther helped him win

Up until one month before Josh Lederberg won the Nobel Prize, he did in fact credit Esther in his work. However, after winning the Nobel Prize, Joshua never credited, or even mentioned, Esther’s role in their scientific discoveries. It is hard to discern just how Esther viewed this injustice. Throughout her life Esther maintained that Joshua was a brilliant scientist.

It is clear that much of Esther’s work was accredited to her husband or other male scientists she was working with.  In class we discussed Joshua’s NLM website. The biography section mentions Esther once, 11 paragraphs in. In addition, it credits the research group with her discovery of lamda. Even the Max Plank institute wrongly credits Joshua with a role in Esther’s lamba discovery.


Sadly Esther story is not unique. Women before and after her have been overlooked or excluded from Nobel Prizes, with no other justification than the fact they are not men (Rosalind Franklin is a classic example). For a complete list of women who have received the Nobel Prize, click here. The Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg website can be found here. You can also check out a short biography of her life, or the disrespectful guardian obituary that continues to perpetuate gender inequality.

 

The problems that Esther M. Lederberg had to surmount during the course of her career included attempted falsification of the historical record, misrepresentation, and theft of correspondence and other documentation, supported by gender discrimination.
                                                - Esther M. Zimmer Lederberg Trust