The Nobel Prize Gender Gap Persists for One Simple Reason

And no, that’s not because men are inherently better at science and other intellectual pursuits

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The Nobel Prize week has come and gone, once again reigniting the debate about why so many recipients of this prestigious award are male.

This year, — Han Kang, the South Korean author who won the Nobel Prize in Literature for her book The Vegetarian. Meanwhile, all the other prizes — including in the sciences — were awarded to men. But that doesn’t mean women’s research efforts didn’t play a role in the discoveries that earned those men their trophies.

Some people were quick to observe that the work of American biologists Gary Ruvkun and Victor Ambros, who received this year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine for their discovery of microRNAs and their role in gene regulation — an insight that could help combat cancer — was made possible by a string of papers, many of which list Rosalind Lee, Ambros’s wife, as an author. Lee’s contribution on social media, but it apparently wasn’t enough to merit awarding her the prize as well. (And in case you’re wondering, Nobel rules allow for up to three people to be recognised, so that certainly wasn’t the issue.)