Nobel Prizes become more diverse, says Royal Academy | World News

Only one woman won the Nobel Prize in Science this year, all 2022 winners Hail from the US or Europe, but the prestigious awards are becoming more diverse, an awards official said Monday. Hans Ellergren, secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Physics and Economics, said he was “pretty pleased” with the progress made.

“In the past five years, we have had four women in chemistry. That’s half of all women in chemistry who have ever won the award,” he told AFP in an interview.

“Even though physics is a very male-dominated field of science, there are two women in physics, and we have one woman in economic science,” he said.

America’s Carolyn Bertozzi shares this year’s Chemistry Prize – along with two men, Barry Sharpless of the United States and Morten Meldal of Denmark – as the only women nominated for a science subject this year. Ellegren said Nobel science prizes are usually awarded to people who did research decades ago, when there were fewer women in the lab.

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“The laureates (honors) now reflect what the scientific community was like at the time,” he said.

This year’s only other female winner is French author Anne Erno, won the Literature Prize. The record for most women winning the Nobel Prize in one year was in 2009, when five women were awarded, followed by 2018 and 2020, with four women each. The most recent year without a female winner was 2017, although this was common before 2000.

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The 2022 season also doesn’t have much geographic spread among the winners. Five are from the EU (Austria, Denmark, two from France and Sweden), while six are from the US.

Peace laureate Ales Bialiatski, a jailed Belarusian dissident, is the only recipient not from a wealthy country. Ellegren said he believes there will be more geographic diversity in the coming years.

“I hope so. But we can’t guarantee, and we can’t really foresee who will win the award. But one can really think that there will be changes in terms of geographic origins as well,” he said.

Several Asians have won Nobel Prizes in science and this trend is expected to grow in the future.