That said, some efforts are under way to make prizes fairer. The authors of an unpublished analysis of almost 9,000 winners of science prizes dating back to the eighteenth century (presented at this year’s EGU meeting) managed to identify just one woman of colour. The situation could well be even worse for minority genders and people of colour, but the data needed to assess this are rarely collected. According to an analysis of 141 top prizes awarded over the period from 2001 to 2020, the proportion given to women fell short of the proportion of female professors in several fields 1. But this alone doesn’t suffice as an explanation for award-givers, because even when the imbalance is taken into account, women remain under-represented in prizes. Systemic barriers mean that women and people of colour, and especially women of colour, are under-represented in science in high-income nations. Women more likely to win awards that are not named after men They should consider doing so, because understanding patterns in nominations and nominees is integral to determining why members of groups that are marginalized in science remain under-represented among prizewinners. Sadly, however, the EGU is among the outliers - most scientific societies do not make nomination data public. Although women are still under-represented in EGU nominations, their share of awards is now approaching their representation among EGU members, thanks to corrective measures taken by the organization’s awards committee. This is clearly a problem, but awareness of the situation opens the door to fixing it. The data also showed that people tend to favour their own gender when making nominations - with men most likely to nominate other men. Although women make up 37% of the society’s members, they made just 20% of nominations - suggesting that women are less likely to nominate than men. The chair of its awards committee, Thomas Blunier, presented a breakdown, by gender, of prize nominees and nominators since 2014. But some of the most prestigious awards are also among those with the most secretive selection processes - and that fuels the under-representation of women and people from minority groups among winners.Īt its annual general assembly in Vienna last month, the European Geosciences Union (EGU) did something unusual. Prizes boost careers and create role models. The organizers of the Nobel prizes should consider publishing aggregate data on the diversity of nominators and nominees for prizes.