来源：《自然》
原文刊登日期：2022年6月15日
Prizes boost careers and create role models. 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.
奖项能促进职业发展，树立榜样。但一些最负盛名的奖项也属于遴选过程最隐秘的奖项，这加剧了女性和少数族裔在获奖者中代表性不足的现象。
At its annual general assembly last month, the European Geosciences Union (EGU) did something unusual. The chair of its awards committee, Thomas Blunier, presented a breakdown, by gender, of prize nominees and nominators since 2014. The data were revealing. 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 data also showed that people tend to favour their own gender when making nominations — with men most likely to nominate other men.
在上个月的年度大会上，欧洲地球科学联盟(EGU)做了一件不寻常的事。颁奖委员会主席托马斯·布朗尼尔列出了自2014年以来，按性别分列的奖项被提名人和提名人名单。数据很能说明问题。尽管女性占协会成员的37%，但她们只获得了20%的提名，这表明女性提名的可能性低于男性。数据还显示，人们在提名时倾向于选择自己的性别，而男性最有可能提名其他男性。
This is clearly a problem, but awareness of the situation opens the door to fixing it. 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. Sadly, however, the EGU is among the outliers — most scientific societies do not make nomination data public. 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.
这显然是一个问题，但意识到这种情况会打开解决问题的大门。尽管女性在EGU的提名中仍然没有得到充分代表，但由于该组织的颁奖委员会采取了纠正措施，她们获得的奖项份额现在已经接近她们在EGU成员中的代表性。然而，遗憾的是，EGU是一个例外——大多数科学协会都不公开提名数据。他们应该考虑公开，因为了解提名和被提名者的模式对于确定为什么在科学领域被边缘化群体的成员在获奖者中仍然没有得到充分代表是不可或缺的。
Systemic barriers mean that women and people of colour, and especially women of colour, are under-represented in science in high-income nations. 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. 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.
系统性障碍意味着，在高收入国家，女性和有色人种，尤其是有色人种女性在科学领域的代表性不足。但仅仅这一点还不足为颁奖者解释，因为即使考虑到这种不平衡，女性在奖项中的代表性仍然不足。根据对2001年至2020年期间颁发的141项最高奖项的分析，在几个领域，女性获得的最高奖项比例低于女性教授的比例。
The situation could well be even worse for women and people of colour, but the data needed to assess this are rarely collected. The authors of an unpublished analysis of almost 9,000 winners of science prizes dating back to the eighteenth century managed to identify just one woman of colour.
对女性和有色人种来说，情况可能更糟，但评估这一点所需的数据很少收集。一项未发表的分析报告的作者对18世纪以来的近9000名科学奖得主进行了分析，结果只发现了一名有色人种女性。
That said, some efforts are under way to make prizes fairer. In mathematics, for example, the International Mathematical Union, which awards the Fields Medal, has introduced guidelines to make nominators and award-committee members aware of unconscious bias. Many prize nomination forms now include statements encouraging nominators to consider diversity, and the committees that award Nobel prizes have told Nature that they are attempting to increase diversity in nominees and that the proportion of women nominated is rising. No Black person has won a natural-science prize in the awards’ 121-year history, and just 22 women have done so.
尽管如此，一些努力正在进行中，以使颁奖更加公平。例如，在数学方面，颁发菲尔兹奖的国际数学联盟推出了指导方针，让提名者和颁奖委员会成员意识到无意识的偏见。现在，许多奖项的提名表格包括鼓励提名者考虑多样性的声明，颁发诺贝尔奖的委员会告诉《自然》杂志，他们正在努力增加被提名者的多样性，女性被提名的比例正在上升。在诺贝尔自然科学奖的121年历史中，还没有黑人获得过，女性只有22人获得过。
However, neither the organizers of the Fields Medal nor the organizers of the Nobel prizes publish up-to-date aggregate data on nominators or nominees.
然而，无论是菲尔兹奖的组织者还是诺贝尔奖的组织者，都没有公布关于提名者或被提名者的最新汇总数据。