Let’s start with a game: write down every year the Nobel Prize was awarded on slips of paper, then toss them into a bowl. Now, draw as many as you like—go ahead, pick at random.

The twist? No matter how many you pull, they all carry the same sobering truth: 93.45% of the time, the year listed in the slips of paper will have awarded the Nobel Prize to a man.

The Nobel Prize, hailed as the paramount recognition of intellectual achievement since 1901, is marred with a blemish: systemic sexism. Out of the 992 laureates in its history, only 65 are women—a statistic that speaks less to a lack of brilliance and more to the barriers women face in reaching the heights of recognition.

In 2024, this pattern remained unbroken, with every single Nobel Prize in the sciences awarded to men. This mirrors deep-rooted barriers that have long kept women from entering and succeeding in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields.

From limited access to research funding to implicit biases that question their credibility, women in STEM have had to fight not just for breakthroughs, but for the right to be seen at all.

This unveils an irony that glares right into the core of the Nobel’s integrity: how can the award truly celebrate excellence when the systemic exclusion of women is hardwired into the process of recognition itself?

The Matilda Effect

In 1946, a young girl aspiring to be a scientist wrote to Albert Einstein. At the end of her letter, she added a request that no boy would have ever needed to make: “I hope you will not think any the less of me for being a girl!”

However, the annals of history only prove how justified her fears were.

To this day, the scientific landscape remains a battlefield where women tirelessly contribute, only to be met with a “glass ceiling”: a term illustrating the discriminatory obstacle that denies them equal opportunities and recognition, rendering them almost—if not fully—invisible.

The statistics speak volumes: in the STEM fields, only 25 women have received Nobel Prizes—a sorry figure that accounts for less than 3% of all laureates.

Such a shameless pattern of dismissing women’s achievements can no longer be brushed aside as a series of unfortunate coincidences. It is a deliberate, systemic phenomenon rooted in deep-seated sexism and misogyny—one aptly named the Matilda Effect.

Coined by historian Margaret W. Rossiter after suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, the Matilda Effect describes how women’s accomplishments are routinely diminished or outright stolen, allowing men to claim the glory.

“The Matilda Effect is understood as the work that women have done throughout history that has never reached posterity. This is especially noticeable in science,” explained Maite Paramaio, president of the Association of Women Researchers and Technologists.

The Matilda Effect reveals a hard truth: the system is not just broken—it was never built for women in the first place.

It finds its most damning expression in the stories of brilliant women whose groundbreaking contributions were either diminished or blatantly robbed.

Now, let’s bring their voices to the forefront.

Lisa Meitner

Lise Meitner’s exclusion from the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry stands as one of the most egregious injustices in scientific history—a betrayal not just of one woman, but of truth itself.

As a physicist and the first woman in Germany to become a full professor in physics, Meitner’s research with Otto Hahn led to the discovery of nuclear fission—uncovering how uranium atoms could split into two.

Forced to flee Nazi Germany due to her Jewish heritage, Meitner continued her groundbreaking research in exile, working under increasingly difficult conditions. Yet, when the Nobel Prize for the discovery was awarded, only Hahn was named a laureate.

Meitner was not only left out—her name was deliberately erased from the very paper she had helped pioneer, because Hahn feared that acknowledging a Jewish co-author would cost him recognition.

Decades later, when the Nobel Committee’s deliberations were unsealed, it was revealed that Meitner had received more nominations than Hahn himself. The truth became undeniable: this wasn’t a case of ignorance—it was an act of exclusion, proving that even in the pursuit of scientific truth, bias had the final word.

Marie Curie

In 1903, Marie Curie became the first ever woman to win a Nobel in the sciences—a feat that stands even taller when put beside the blatant misogyny in that era.

Rewriting the very fabric of science at a time when women were barred from laboratories and dismissed as mere assistants, she pioneered the field of radioactivity and revolutionized modern medicine and physics through the discovery of two new elements: polonium and radium. Her research became the foundation of X-ray technology, cancer radiation therapy, and even nuclear energy—shaping the world in ways she never lived to see.

Despite her groundbreaking contributions, however, her name was nowhere to be found when the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics was first considered. According to historical records from the American Institute of Physics, the French Academy of Sciences initially nominated Henri Becquerel and Pierre Curie—omitting hers—as if scientific achievement could exist in isolation from the woman who helped make it possible.

Marie Curie’s name was an afterthought—added to the laureates’ list only after she and her husband pressured the committee to correct its oversight, presenting irrefutable evidence of her discoveries.

Rosalind Franklin

Have you ever wondered why the Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) is called the blueprint of life? Its power lies in its ability to store and transmit genetic information, a function made possible by its unique double-helix structure. The discovery of its structure paved the way for breakthroughs in genetics, medicine, and beyond. But behind this milestone was a scientist whose work was exploited and robbed of credit: Rosalind Franklin.

Franklin’s name is often the first to surface when discussing the glass ceiling in science. As a brilliant chemist and crystallographer, she pioneered the use of X-ray diffraction to capture the clearest image of DNA’s structure—Photo 51.

This revolutionary image provided the critical evidence needed to confirm DNA’s double helix, which not only helped understand genetic inheritance but also laid the foundation for major advances in molecular biology, virology, and even nanotechnology.

Yet, despite her profound impact, Franklin’s name was buried beneath the accolades of her male counterparts.

Her discovery was shared without her consent and formed the basis for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine of James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins. This wasn’t just an oversight—it was a theft of intellectual labor that exemplifies the systemic exclusion of women in science.

Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-Shiung Wu, known as the “First Lady of Physics,” overturned the law of parity in quantum mechanics, a fundamental principle that had been accepted as absolute for three decades.

She designed and conducted the cobalt-60 experiment, proving that nature itself distinguishes between left and right at the subatomic level—an insight that revolutionized our understanding of the universe.

Yet, when the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics for the said discovery was awarded—it went not to her, but to her male collaborators, Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, who had theorized the effect but had not performed the experiment that proved it.

The irony is as glaring as it is devastating: she rewrote the laws of physics to understand a world which refused to rewrite its biases.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Have you ever looked up at the night sky and wondered how we detect the faint, rhythmic signals of dying stars? In 1967, a young graduate student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, did more than wonder—she found the answer.

Burnell uncovered pulsars—rapidly spinning remnants of dead stars, beacons pulsing across the cosmos. It was a discovery that rewrote astrophysics by being the foundation of a “galactic positioning system” to navigate outside the solar system.

Yet, when the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for this revolutionary find, the spotlight bypassed the very woman who had made it possible. The honor went instead to her supervisor, Anthony Hewish—who initially dismissed the discovery as artificial radio interference—and another astronomer, Martin Ryle. Meanwhile, her contributions were relegated to a mere footnote.

Decades later, in 2018, she received the $3 million Breakthrough Prize—a belated recognition of her brilliance yet a stark reminder of the legacy of exclusion that has haunted women in STEM for generations.

These stories of omission not only highlight a disservice to their legacy but also an indictment of the entrenched sexism that continues to pervade academia.

The Illusion of Meritocracy

One of the vows the Nobel Committee swears by is that meritocracy governs recognition. However, the statistics and real-life narratives bring to the foreground that meritocracy fails women when systemic barriers prevent them from being seen as equal contributors.

Göran Hansson, the secretary general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, commented on the lack of female laureates, lamenting, “It’s sad that there are so few women Nobel laureates, and it reflects the unfair conditions in society, particularly in years past but still existing. And there’s so much more to do.”

But such words, though well-meaning, remain hollow without the institutional reforms needed to address the deeply ingrained inequalities that persist.

The very structure of the Nobel Prizes, as dictated by Alfred Nobel’s will, enforces a “great man of history” approach to science that fails to acknowledge the collaborative nature of modern research and the pertinent role of people who are nonconforming to the archetypes which the award is wired to serve.

Shattering the Glass Ceiling

The issue extends far beyond gender. Women from marginalized racial, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds face compounded discrimination in STEM. This invites a broader conversation about how privilege, race, and class intersect to determine whose work is celebrated and whose is ignored.

Recognizing women in STEM is an act of restorative justice, and this entails the imperative that the Nobel Committee must move beyond symbolic gestures and implement meaningful reforms to ensure equity.

This includes diversifying selection panels, mandating transparency in the nomination processes, and retroactively honoring the contributions of those who have been unjustly overlooked.

Without such changes, the Nobel Prize will remain a shard of the glass ceiling—not a beacon of human achievement but a relic of systemic sexism. Until the system is rebuilt, its legacy will not be one of merit but of exclusion, where brilliance is honored only when it fits the mold.