#erasue

Erasure

Until the 1970s the number of women who received Nobel Prizes was roughly proportional to the number of women doing scientific research — a small group of women winning a small number of Nobels. But as the number of women in science has increased over the past 40 years, women Nobelists remain the exception, according to an article in Significance magazine by Stephanie Kovalchik, a statistician at the National Cancer Institute. "The evidence suggests that, in the first half of the 20th Century, qualified women were struggling to enter the scientific profession but those who broke through were as valued as their male colleagues," Kovalchik wrote. Today, that may no longer be the case.