Media commentators continue protesting: only two women physics Nobel laureates in 115 years
DOI: 10.1063/PT.5.8191
A quarter century ago, the scholarly article “The Matilda effect in science” began, “Recent work has brought to light so many cases, historical and contemporary, of women scientists who have been ignored, denied credit or otherwise dropped from sight that a sex-linked phenomenon seems to exist.” Media attention to just such a phenomenon has resumed this year following the announcement of the Nobel Prize in Physics 2016.
The concern has been registered at Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website, the UK’s Telegraph , Al Jazeera America , and the Huffington Post, where a headline charged that the physics Nobel “has a serious diversity problem.” Online, CNN complained , “Of the 198 people who have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, just two have been women.” (The two were Marie Curie and, in 1963, Maria Goeppert-Mayer for discoveries in nuclear shell structure.)
In a Forbes.com commentary , contributor Ethan Siegel , a professor of physics and astronomy at Lewis & Clark College, observed that 2016 is “the 53rd consecutive year that women have been shut out.” Live Science, founded a decade ago as a Space.com complement, asked in a headline, “Are the Nobel Prizes missing female scientists?” That piece appeared also in Scientific American.
At the Washington Post, online science columnist Rachel Feltman’s piece carried a headline that demanded, “What’s the holdup?” Feltman pressed the often-made case for Vera Rubin: “Rubin and her colleague Kent Ford provided the first real evidence of dark matter—yes, dark matter, the unseeable, unknowable, mysterious stuff that makes up more than a quarter of the universe, which is kind of a big deal—decades ago. Her time in the Nobel spotlight is overdue.”
Feltman excerpted an Astronomy.com article making the argument for Rubin:
“The existence of dark matter has utterly revolutionized our concept of the universe and our entire field; the ongoing effort to understand the role of dark matter has basically spawned entire subfields within astrophysics and particle physics at this point,” Emily Levesque, an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, told Astronomy.com. “Alfred Nobel’s will describes the physics prize as recognizing ‘the most important discovery’ within the field of physics. If dark matter doesn’t fit that description, I don’t know what does.”
Feltman also stipulated:
Some might argue that Rubin, an obvious and timely Nobel candidate, should have to wait until dark matter is officially detected until she is given her due. But Rubin is in her late 80s, and the Nobel Prize cannot be given posthumously. Her work on dark matter has spawned entirely new branches of scientific inquiry, and time is running out. This should have been her year.
In a 3 October New York Times op-ed , the physics-educated science writer Gabriel Popkin proclaimed that the “Nobel organization should take a bold leap into the present and shine its bright light more widely—and unshackle itself from a 19th-century vision of what makes good science.” He didn’t address the gender diversity issue, but two years ago in Slate, he presented female physics Nobel candidates including Rubin, who is widely cited in media lists of possibilities.
Also regularly mentioned is Jocelyn Bell Burnell. The Live Science article charges that the 1974 physics Nobel went to Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle for the 1967 discovery of pulsars even though the actual discovery, “made by poring over the data from radio telescopes,” was her work.
In summarizing the history, such as it is, of women and the physics Nobel, the American Physical Society’s APS News in 2013 singled out Rubin and two other women whose names are seen in media discussions of past and present potential laureates: Lise Meitner, whose “guidance was critical to the experimental discovery of nuclear fission,” and Chien-Shiung Wu. Concerning Wu, APS recalled:
[She] specialized in weak interactions and undertook the pivotal experiments on cobalt-60 atoms with colleagues at the National Bureau of Standards that demonstrated unequivocally that parity was not a symmetry of nature. As the work came to a head, Wu even skipped a long-planned trip back to China with her husband, recognizing the importance of the experiment, commuting between her teaching duties at Columbia University and the laboratory in Washington, DC. On a snowy Christmas Eve in 1956, she reported the large asymmetry she had observed to her Columbia colleague, Tsung-Dao Lee, who had laid the theoretical groundwork for the discovery with Chen Ning Yang. Lee and Yang won the 1957 Nobel Prize in physics for their work; Wu was not included.
Media discussions have also pointed to the following women:
- Mildred Dresselhaus, whose physics importance was once encapsulated in this IEEE Spectrum headline : “The Queen of Carbon: Electronics made from nanoscale tubes, wires, and sheets of carbon are coming, thanks to pioneering researcher Mildred Dresselhaus.”
- Fabiola Gianotti, now director general of CERN, and formerly spokeswoman for ATLAS, one of two Large Hadron Collider experiments that discovered the Higgs boson.
- Lene Hau, whose Harvard team used a Bose–Einstein condensate to slow and ultimately stop beams of light.
- The late Deborah Jin, who died in September; in 2014, she won the Comstock Prize in Physics, awarded every five years by the National Academy of Sciences, for “demonstrating quantum degeneracy and the formation of a molecular Bose–Einstein condensate in ultra-cold fermionic atomic gases, and for pioneering work in polar molecular quantum chemistry.”
- Margaret Geller of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; in the 1980s, she and colleague John Huchra began mapping the universe at its largest scales.
- Margaret Murnane, for subfemtosecond lasers.
That list is not exhaustive. Neither is the list of publications mentioned in this media report for having examined the issue of women and the physics Nobel.
As of October 2016, the term Matilda effect doesn’t appear frequently in the news. But back in February, a New York Times Sunday magazine article appeared under the headline “Fighting ‘erasure.’” Let one passage from that piece conclude this one:
“Erasure” refers to the practice of collective indifference that renders certain people and groups invisible. The word migrated out of the academy, where it alluded to the tendency of ideologies to dismiss inconvenient facts, and is increasingly used to describe how inconvenient people are dismissed, their history, pain and achievements blotted out. Compared with words like “diversity” and “representation,” with their glib corporate gloss, “erasure” is a blunt word for a blunt process. It goes beyond simplistic discussions of quotas to ask: Whose stories are taught and told? Whose suffering is recognized? Whose dead are mourned?
The casualties of “erasure” constitute familiar castes: women, minorities, the queer and the poor. In some cases, the process is so routine that it has a name; the suppression of women’s contributions to science, for example, is known as “the Matilda effect,” named for the 19th-century women’s-rights activist Matilda Joslyn Gage. It refers to how female scientists have been left out of textbooks, and seen their research appropriated and their deserved Nobel Prizes given to male colleagues and supervisors.
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA’s history program, and was a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.