Maria Ressa Was the Only Woman Awarded a Nobel Prize in 2021
One Woman Won a 2021 Nobel Prize, Less Than Average Last Decade
(Bloomberg) -- Only one woman was awarded a Nobel Prize this year, out of 13 laureates.
Journalist Maria Ressa of the Philippines shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Russia’s Dmitry Muratov. While that’s better than the record in 2016 and 2017 when women won no awards at all, it is still lower than the average for the last decade.
Between 1901 and 2021, the Nobel prizes have been awarded to 58 women, with Marie Curie having won two awards, for physics in 1903 and for chemistry in 1911. This compares with 885 male laureates and 25 organizations that have won the prize.
The economics prize, which has been awarded since 1969, has been won by women only twice, in 2009 and 2019. Peter Fredriksson, chair of the economics prize committee, said in an interview in Stockholm on Monday that female representation among the economics laureates is “an issue that we take very seriously.”
“It is probably related to the low representation of women within the field of economics historically,” Fredriksson said. “That said there is hope for change, because if you look at the Bates-Clark prize, which is awarded to economists under 40, the first woman got the prize 2007, and since then another 4 women have received the prize.”
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