Unheralded women and Nobel Prizes
Gender bias prohibits the support of young women pursuing careers in the field of science.
In 2018, when Donna Strickland won the Nobel Prize in Physics for her work with lasers, she was still only an associate professor at the University of Waterloo. University faculty are usually hired as assistant professors and then promoted to associate status before finally, when successful, being promoted to full professors (usually just called professors). The university said that a simple application with the line “received the Nobel Prize” would allow Strickland to be promoted, which has now happened. But the embarrassment of the university highlights the all-too-common sidelining of women in science.
Medical breakthroughs
This year, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman. They received the prize for their work on mRNA vaccine technology, published in 2005, leading to the covid-19 vaccine that saved an estimated 15 million lives. Karikó, in a personal memoir, documents how challenging her career has been. Her work did not receive the funding it needed. Her positions at her university were often marginal, and she was even demoted once. In 2013, her lab space was removed. She has had a long history of being unheralded.
The same thing seems to be happening to a researcher who was heavily involved in discovering GLP-1, a peptide that controls insulin release from the pancreas. The discovery of this hormone has led to several drugs that are changing the treatment of obesity and diabetes. Svetlana Mojsov, who did much of the work to describe GLP-1 and showed that it is produced in the intestines and acts on the pancreas, is routinely ignored when awards are given to the males who worked with her on this hormone.
Why women earn less
Interestingly, the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize (also known as the Economics Nobel) was awarded to Claudia Goldin, an economics researcher who has studied why women have earned less than men for at least the last 200 years. Currently, women earn on average about 13 percent less than men. Goldin has argued that one problem is that companies’ practices have been female-unfriendly for many years.
Doing a quick Google search, it appears pastors also see a similar gender disparity in pay. This might be something to explore the next time your church sets its budgets and approves salaries.
God is often described as male, restricting our ability to speak to the reality of who God is. As Christians, we argue that our God transcends gender. Galatians 3:27 says, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Thus, we have come to realize that for the same work or task, the rewards should be the same, regardless of who is doing them. We need to open our eyes to structural biases and recognize the value of the work of all God’s people. In the current reality of gender bias, as we have seen in science, it is crucial especially to support young women so they realize that they, too, can become scientists, pastors or anything else they choose.
