ABSTRACT
Since Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously a number of commentators, including but not only feminists, viewing the three women honoured in the 1980s, have suggested that longevity is increasingly an additional criterion for women scientists to meet. It seems that the Nobel committee, in responding to the new pressure on it to recognize women scientists, feels safer in going back in history, to acknowledge those whose scientific eminence is unquestionable but who have been previously passed over. Perhaps men with the power to give public recognition suffer from an inability to recognize scientific merit in peer-group women, whereas they have no such problem with peer-aged or even younger men. However, in that a central rationale for awarding the cash-rich Nobel Prize was to free creative scientists from concerns about resources, then these most recently honoured women would seem to be ineligible, and certainly other older men scientists have been explicitly excluded on precisely these grounds.1
