Issues With Nobel Prize | Latest Burning Issues

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As per the data from The Swedish Academy says since the prize was founded in 1901, women have won 49 out of 923 prizes (Till the end of 2017) About one in every 20

Göran Hansson, vice chair of the board of directors of the Nobel Foundation

We are very proud of the laureates who were awarded the prize this year. But we are disappointed looking at the larger perspective that more women have not been awarded. Part of it is that we go back in time to identify discoveries. We have to wait until they have been verified and validated, before we can award the prize. There was an even larger bias against women then. There were far fewer women scientists if you go back 20 or 30 years.
But I’m not sure that’s the entire explanation. We and other prize-awarding institutions have taken measures. If you look at the Nobel Prize committees, there are women chairing three of the six committees. There are female scientists on all the committees. So I don’t think there is any substantial, er, male chauvinist bias in the committees. The committees have invited—have taken special efforts to identify—women scientists to be nominated for the prize. But that has started this year, because we are concerned that we may not get enough nominations for female scientists.
I suspect there are many more women who are deserving to be considered for the prize. Therefore, we have started to identify leading women scientists and have invited for them to be nominated. We will, starting next year, indicate in our invitation to nominate women scientists and consider ethnic and geographic diversity. Finally, we are going to have a conference this winter with the different prize committees to discuss this issue. So we are concerned, and we are taking measures. I hope that in five years or ten years, we will see a very different situation.

Per Stromberg, the chair of the committee

First is that we are indeed awarding research, where discoveries were made in the 70s, 80s, early 90s, during a time when we had much more of a gender bias in economics as well as in many other sciences. It basically means that, as time goes by, the fraction of women Nobel laureates will increase. You can look at some of the prizes given to younger economists, the gender distribution is more even.
Second is that we are very concerned. What you have to realize is that the committee doesn’t freely decide on the prizes.We aggregate the opinion of the nominators all over the world.We are reliant on their nominations. So if there’s anything we can do, it’s a call for the nominating bodies to take this issue very seriously.

European/US Dominance

Tools of Advertisement

Medicine, Physics and Chemistry Various Universities, organisations and governments advertise the strength of their research community by boasting of the number of Nobel laureates in their ranks.

Nobel Prizes often become a marker of eminence.

Nobel winning scientists – Part of political game Demonetisation? GST?

Nobel Prize – Acts as a cosmetic and not the medicine for the problems

FAKE NATIONALISM Example – India Kalpana Chawla Analogy Medicine, Physics and Chemistry skews the public’s idea about which sciences are important Mathematics is ignored, as are computing, robotics and artificial intelligence as well as environmental sciences

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society and joint winner of the 2009 chemistry Nobel, is also critical.In his book Gene Machine, he says that “the [Nobel] prize has increasingly become a lottery” and is part of a global awards system “beset by cronyism”.

The appointment of friends and associates to positions of authority, without proper regard to their qualifications.

Nobel awards committee’s intense secrecy Omission of Big Names Dmitri Mendeleev, creator of the periodic table of elements Lise Meitner, who discovered nuclear fission The rule that states that no more than three people can win an individual science Nobel Peter Higgs and François Englert for theoretical work that -discovery, in 2012, of the sub-atomic particle that was named the Higgs boson and which plays an important role in the distribution of mass in the universe.

2017 physics Nobel recognised the first observation of gravitational waves, a discovery outlined in a paper signed by more than 1,000 scientists.

The prize honoured only three of them.

The rule of three reinforces the layperson’s impression that science is done by one or two lone geniuses – usually white males – working without vast support networks behind them It reflects a mistaken view of science, attributing supernatural powers and wisdom to individual scientists, when modern science is very much a group affair

2007, Al Gore won the Nobel peace prize along with the entire Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for their work on global warming