Today is the first time EVER that the Nobel committee has awarded a physics prize to a woman astronomer/astrophysicist, and only the fourth time in 117 years that a woman has won the general physics prize.

Big congratulations are in order for Andrea Ghez & other prize winners (Roger Penrose and Reinhard Genzel), but it persists that fantastic woman astronomers like Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Vera Rubin were snubbed by an organisation that refuses to correct glaring past sexism

Bell Burnell's supervisors won the 1974 Nobel for HER PhD work. Vera Rubin discovered dark matter (!!!) and was never honoured in her life.

(for comparison, the 2011 Nobel prize was awarded for the observational discovery of dark energy, so Rubin's work is definitely deserving)

In broader physics, Lise Meitner's collaborators got the 1944 prize for the discovery of nuclear fission, despite the fact that she contributed just as much to the research as them. She was snubbed not only for being a woman but also because she was Jewish.

Plus, we only ever talk about the obvious examples of women who missed out! There have been 216 Nobel Physics laureates and just four have been women, two of which were in the last three years. There are likely dozens of women who were not considered because of their gender

It pains me every year to see so many people celebrate the award of Nobel prizes. The organisation refuses to correct even its most glaring past mistakes, and the highest award in physics is forever tainted by sexism, racism and anti-semitism because of that.

We owe an awful lot of the negative perceptions of minorities in science to horrible things that influential organisations like the Nobel prize did and continue to do.

Until they fully recognise all of the people who have been unfairly denied prizes (incl. posthumously) then to me, the @NobelPrize means pretty much jack shit.

We shouldn't celebrate piecemeal awards from 2018 onwards until we have full correction of past errors.

(Feel free to add examples/resources to this thread, let's all get educated)

Here's a really shitty tweet by @NobelPrize from earlier this year when they were highly dismissive of Lise Meitner's work w/ a history thread by moi https://twitter.com/emilydoesastro/status/1213101165287739394