Gordon L. Weil
Among this year’s Nobel Prizes, four of the six awards went to a woman – two of them without a male counterpart. The world’s top prizes recognized the role of women in a rare year of multiple women winners. They won outright the Peace and Economic Sciences prizes and shared with men in Physics and Medicine.
The stories of two of them, both Americans, reveal both the progress and the obstacles to redressing the exclusion of half the population from leadership and recognition.
Katalin Karikό, who came to the U.S. from Hungary in 1985, was a key scientist in developing mRNA, the basis for the most reliable vaccinations against Covid. She shared the award with a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, though she could barely gain an academic foothold there.
Her research was so advanced that skeptical funders were reluctant to give her grants. Instead of stepping up, Penn demoted her and moved her to a remote lab. After she and her male colleague perfected their discovery, Penn patented it and has made millions. She got none of the money and went to work for one of the companies that produce the vaccine.
Now, she’s a marginal Penn faculty member. Penn is glad to claim her as one of its own, but even now it seems a bit cool to her. She may be more popular in Hungary, where she holds professorial rank, than in Philadelphia, where she doesn’t. Her counterpart remains a top professor.
Claudia Goldin won the economics prize for her work on understanding the gender gap in employment. With a career at top universities, she is now a professor at Harvard.
Goldin has challenged the belief that women will gain equal pay with men and to rise to the top of business organizations. She found that child care responsibilities cut their earnings prospects; she has no children. She also explored the “blind auditions” for women seeking seats in orchestras and confirmed the discrimination when they auditioned with no screen hiding them.
Goldin was given tenure, a permanent professorship in 1990, the first at Harvard in her field. Harvard was founded in 1636 as a men’s college and for most of its history wouldn’t allow women to teach men. Bowdoin College, a Harvard spin-off, was founded in 1794 and followed the same rule.
One of the arguments used against promoting women, Goldin found, was that they were less well educated. Now, more women than men are getting college degrees, undermining that argument. It is also linked with changes in American politics.
Among the top 25 states by percentage of college graduates, all but five routinely vote for Democrats. Those states and D.C. include Maine.
The last state in this top group is Georgia, now clearly on the cusp and no longer to be counted on by the Republicans. Just ask Donald Trump. The next group of states includes Arizona, Wisconsin, Texas and Alaska, which may not be far from flipping.
The politics of states with more college graduates may show the increased influence of women among voters. If that’s true, then as women increasingly outnumber men among college graduates, state voting may increasingly tip to the Democrats.
Some Republicans say their congressional election results were disappointing in 2022 and attribute a shortfall from their expected results to the effect of the abortion issue, which resonated with many women voters. It may have mattered more than merely serving as a partisan wedge issue.
This possible trend toward more women being educated and more educated voters being Democrats might help explain Republican efforts in states like Texas and Wisconsin to make it more difficult for Democratic voters among the poor to gain access to the ballot box. If so, this move can only work temporarily at best.
Maine is a good example of the political change that’s taking place. It is a rare state that once had two women senators at the same time. It now has one woman and one man in each of the Senate and the House and its first woman governor. The Senate president is a man and the House Speaker is a woman. The Chief Justice is a woman.
Congress is also changing, but none of the top eight leaders is a woman, while 29 percent of the House and a quarter of the Senate are women. Since Congress first convened in 1789, only one, California Democrat Nancy Pelosi, has ever risen to the top.
The courts are doing better. Thanks to presidents of both parties, four of the nine justices of the Supreme Court are women.
Both parties have good potential candidates for the presidency who are women. What stands between them and major party nominations are old men. Is it now time for a change?
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