(HOST) Commentator Madeleine Kunin has been thinking about science, women and the Nobel Prize.
(KUNIN) It seems so long ago that former Harvard President Larry Summers stirred up a gender storm when he opined why there were so few outstanding women scientists.
The announcements of the recent Nobel Prizes is the answer we’ve been waiting for – the women are out there, we just had to wait a little and then we had to identify them.
For the first time, three women won prizes in science, two in physiology and one in chemistry – and for the first time ever – one woman won the Nobel Prize in economics.
At last we are beginning to see the fruits of equal education opportunities for women. Some women have waited a long time for recognition – Elinor Ostrom, a political economist, is 76 and shares the economics prize with Oliver Williamson. Unlike earlier prize winners whose work was more theoretical, she has taken a practical problem solving approach to her research, analyzing how common resources – forests, fisheries, oilfields and such, can be managed successfully by the people who use them, rather than by governments or private companies. She did her work in the field to see how local people monitor each other.
The two women who shared the physiology prize with a third male winner, are younger. Unlike prize winners of the male sex, Carol W. Greider was informed of her award early in the morning while she was doing the family laundry. Later that day, she made sure her two children were in the picture at the Nobel press conference at Johns Hopkins University. That makes a statement, she noted.
Asked by the NY Times how women in science may be different, she thought that women might be more collaborative. Experiments would not be done differently, but women could bring "a different social way of interacting," she explained.
Why are there so many women in her field of telomeres?
It was a man, Joe Gall, who fostered women scientists in her field, she explained. These women got jobs around the country and trained other women. It’s not that men are biased against women, "they just don’t think of them."
We are all familiar with the "old boy’s network," and now we are seeing the beginning of an "old girls network," not just in science, but also in politics and business. The real rewards of having more women in once male domains will accrue to a society which can harvest the brainpower of the whole population, not just the fifty percent that has historically been deemed qualified.
(TAG) You can find more commentaries by Madeleine Kunin on line at VPR-dot-net.