Only 60 of the more than 900 people who have won the Nobel Prize have been women. Stacker has curated a gallery of every one.
There are 60 women who have been awarded a Nobel Prize out of the more than 900 recipients. One woman—Marie Curie—received the Nobel Prize twice.
To highlight all the women who have won, Stacker turned to data from the Nobel Prize website. These women have made outstanding contributions to the worlds of medicine, science, art, and peace-keeping. Just reaching this height of fame and recognition meant facing seemingly insurmountable challenges. Many women on this list had to contend with extreme sexism in male-dominated professions, but some Nobel Prize winners also had to overcome physical violence. All their stories are unique and equally inspiring.
Nobel committees have distinct methods for deciding winners. The Nobel Peace Prize, for example, is awarded by a five-person committee and anyone who meets the criteria can be nominated. For literature, however, nominations can only be made by qualified people. Despite the different nomination and selection processes, two rules apply to all awards: People cannot nominate themselves, and the names of the nominators and the nominees cannot be revealed until 50 years after winners are announced.
The 2022 Peace Prize was shared among three awardees, among them a pair of human rights organizations either founded by or led by women; while this, in the strictest sense, does not qualify these organizations for this list, we felt it was of interest and importance to include mention of this fact. Svetlana Gannushkina, a mathematician and Russian human rights activist, co-founded Memorial in 1989 and in the intervening years has continued to defend human rights within Russia and former Soviet bloc nations. The other organization recognized this year, the Center for Civil Liberties, is led by chief executive Oleksandra Romantsova, a Ukrainian rights advocate who began her work at the CCL in 2014.
While the number of women Nobel laureates remains unduly small relative to the awards’ history, their contributions have had an indelible impact on the world stage. Read on to learn about these women’s exciting contributions to society, from helpful advancements in the HIV epidemic to the abolition of landmines to—in the case of 2021 winner Carolyn R. Bertozzi—pioneering research into how molecules can function like Lego blocks.
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Marie Curie (born Skłodowska)
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physics and Nobel Prize in Chemistry
– Year: 1903 and 1911
Marie Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, coined the term “radioactivity.” In 1903, she and her husband won the Nobel Prize for Physics for their study into spontaneous radiation. They share the award with Antoine Henri Becquerel for his discovery of radioactivity.
Curie also received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for her further investigation of radium and polonium. She was the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes, and she promoted the use of radium in the First World War to treat soldiers who were injured.
Baroness Bertha Sophie Felicita von Suttner (born Countess Kinsky von Chinic und Tettau)
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 1905
Referred to as the “generalissimo of the peace movement,” this Austrian woman penned an anti-war novel called “Lay Down Your Arms” that won her the Nobel Peace Prize. It was one of the most influential books during the century with a strong anti-militaristic message.
Selma Ottilia Lovisa Lagerlöf
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 1909
Born in Sweden, Selma Lagerlöf won the Nobel Prize in Literature. She’s often credited for having a vivid imagination, and she has used stories from her hometown in Värmland County as inspiration. “Gösta Berling’s Saga” was the name of her first novel.
Grazia Deledda
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 1926
This Italian writer who lived in Rome for part of her life earned the Nobel Prize for Literature for stories about life on her native island of Sardinia. She also developed some of her characters based on people she knew in real life.
Sigrid Undset
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 1928
The Second World War and the Nazi invasion forced this writer to flee Norway, but she returned when the war was over. She was born in Denmark and wrote a trilogy about life in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, called “Kristin Lavransdatter.”
Jane Addams
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 1931
Born in Cedarville, Illinois, Jane Addams was a social worker and a feminist. She stood at the forefront of the settlement house movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.
Irène Joliot-Curie
– Award: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
– Year: 1935
Born in Paris, this French scientist was the daughter of Nobel winners Pierre and Marie Curie. Jointly with her husband, Irène was awarded the Nobel for discovering artificial radioactivity. Her research was an important step in the discovery of uranium fission.
Pearl Buck
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 1938
Pearl Buck, who was born in West Virginia, began writing in the ’20s. She was the daughter of missionaries and spent most of her life before 1934 in Zhenjiang, China. Her novel “The Good Earth” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 and was a bestseller.
Gabriela Mistral
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 1945
Gabriela Mistral is a pseudonym for Lucila Godoy y Alcayaga. She was born in Vicuña, Chile, and began to write poetry after her lover, a railway employee, died by suicide. She taught at various universities around the U.S.
Emily Greene Balch
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 1946
Emily Balch was 79 when she received the Nobel. An American economist and sociologist born in Boston, she tackled difficult social issues, from poverty to immigration, that were widespread at the time.
Gerty Theresa Cori (born Radnitz)
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 1947
Born in Prague, Gerty Theresa Cori was a Jewish Austrian American biochemist. She was married to Carl Cori, and the two studied how the body utilizes energy. Both are credited for development of the Cori cycle, an essential part of metabolism.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physics
– Year: 1963
Maria Goeppert-Mayer was born in Germany. After she married, she migrated to America, where she worked on an American atom bomb project during World War II. Her work uncovered important discoveries about nuclear structure, and Goeppert-Mayer is one of only four women to win the Nobel Prize in physics.
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin
– Award: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
– Year: 1964
Dorothy Hodgkin was a British chemist whose interest in research began when, as a child, she received a chemistry book containing experiments with crystals. She studied at Oxford University and developed protein crystallography, which advanced the development of X-rays. This earned her the Nobel Prize.
Nelly Sachs
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 1966
Nelly Sachs was a writer whose experiences during World War II resonated with other Jewish people. She wrote plays and poetry collections, such as “Zeichen im Sand,” and did not shy away from difficult subjects, such as the horrors of life in concentration camps.
Mairead Corrigan
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 1976
A peace activist who began working in the Northern Ireland peace movement and later co-founded the Community for Peace People, Mairead Corrigan was born in Belfast. Her sister, who was the Northern Irish secretary, lost three of her children in a shooting incident in Belfast. She and a witness to the crime founded a peace organization to help put the conflict to rest.
Betty Williams
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 1976
Betty Williams was the witness to the killing of Mairead Corrigan’s sister’s three children, and she jointly shares the Nobel Peace Prize with Corrigan, as the co-founder of the Community for Peace People. An advocate of religious tolerance, Williams is the daughter of a Protestant father and Catholic mother.
Rosalyn Sussman Yalow
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 1977
Rosalyn Yalow, a lifelong New Yorker, was a nuclear physicist. She shares the Nobel for the development of the radioimmunoassay technique with physician Solomon Berson. The duo proved that Type 2 diabetes is caused by the body’s inefficient use—not a lack—of insulin. RIA can be used to measure hormones in the blood.
Mother Teresa
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 1979
Mother Teresa was only 12 when she felt called to God and became a missionary. She joined the convent, then left to work among the slums of Calcutta. Wanting to help, she created the Missionaries of Charity, and by the same year, she won her Nobel.
Alva Myrdal
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 1982
This Swedish diplomat shared the Nobel with Alfonso Garcia Robles, a Mexican diplomat who, like Myrdal, advocated nuclear disarmament. Myrdal worked for the United Nations and for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Barbara McClintock
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 1983
By studying the hereditary of corn, such as the different colors of kernels, Barbara McClintock proved that genetic elements can sometimes swap into a new position on a chromosome. McClintock, who was from Connecticut, studied at Cornell’s College of Agriculture.
Rita Levi-Montalcini
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 1986
Born in Italy, Rita Levi-Montalcini received the Nobel for her work in neurobiology. She shares the honor jointly with her colleague, Stanley Cohen, for the discovery of “nerve growth factor,” which has shed new light on tumors, wound healing, and other medical problems.
Gertrude B. Elion
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 1988
Gertrude Elion garnered the Nobel for her discoveries of important principles for drug treatment. Elion had watched her grandfather die of cancer, and she vowed to fight the disease throughout her life. Elion, together with George Hitchings—with whom she shares the award—created a system for drug production that relies heavily on biochemistry.
Nadine Gordimer
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 1991
Nadine Gordimer, a South African child of Jewish immigrants, was a writer who was only 15 when her first literary work was published. But it was her novel, “The Conservationist,” for which she was well known. A good portion of her work discussed apartheid.
Aung San Suu Kyi
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 1991
Aung San Suu Kyi is a complicated figure in Myanmar (formerly Burma). When she was awarded the Peace Price in 1991, she was under house arrest for her efforts to bring democracy to the country, assuming a leading role in opposing Burma’s military junta. The party she founded, the National League for Democracy, won in a landslide in 2015, bringing her to power. But her legacy has been defiled in her treatment of Myanmar’s mostly Muslim Rohingya minority. In 2021 she was deposed in a military coup, who took control of the country, placing her back under house arrest.
Rigoberta Menchú Tum
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 1992
This Guatemalan Indian rights activist gained worldwide attention with her book “I, Rigoberta Menchú,” a memoir that recaps the murders of her brother and mother. She received the Nobel for her efforts to achieve social justice in Guatemala.
Toni Morrison
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 1993
Toni Morrison, whose book “Beloved” earned her the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award, was the first Black woman to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. Born in Ohio, Morrison was a writer whose work often chronicled life in the Black community; she also served as professor emeritus at Princeton University.
Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 1995
Called “decidedly lazy” by a high school teacher, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard is a geneticist who published her first book for a popular audience, “Coming to Life,” in 2006. She took the helm of a landmark study that looked at genetic mutations in the fruit fly.
Wislawa Szymborska
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 1996
A native of Poland, Wislawa Szymborska was recognized by the Nobel committee for writing poetry that has “ironic precision.” Szymborska lived most of her life in Krakow. She attended Jagiellonian University and studied Polish literature.
Jody Williams
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 1997
Jody Williams, born in Vermont, advocates against landmines and is a prominent peace activist. She got her feet wet doing aid work in El Salvador and helped launch an international campaign against landmines.
Shirin Ebadi
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 2003
Shirin Ebadi earned her Nobel for spearheading democracy and furthering human rights, especially as they relate to women, refugees, and children. She’s also an Iranian lawyer and the founder of the Defenders of Human Rights Center.
Linda B. Buck
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 2004
Linda Buck attributes her mother’s interest in puzzles as what ignited her interest in science. She is an American biologist hailing from Seattle whose work on olfactory receptors earned her the Nobel, along with Richard Axel.
Wangari Muta Maathai
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 2004
Born in Nyeri, Kenya, Wangari Muta Maathai was the first woman in East and Central Africa to receive a doctorate degree. All her work to advance democracy and human rights earned her Nobel. She has spoken in front of the U.N. and at special sessions of the General Assembly.
Elfriede Jelinek
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 2004
Although a social phobia prevented this Austrian author from accepting her Nobel in person, Elfriede Jelinek has composed famous works such as the novels “The Piano Teacher” and “Lust.” She is a critic of modern consumer society and sets out in her work to chronicle the hidden structures of topics such as sexism.
Doris Lessing
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 2007
First published at age 15, Doris Lessing was a visionary novelist, poet, and playwright. She was born in Iran to British parents, later moved to London, and has written 50 books.
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 2008
Françoise Barré-Sinoussi made strides against the AIDS epidemic and in advancing treatment for her work with HIV. Barré-Sinoussi shares the Nobel with Luc Montagnier, who discovered a retrovirus in patients marked with swollen lymph glands that attacked lymphocytes.
Carol W. Greider
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 2009
Carol Greider, an American molecular biologist, is a professor at Johns Hopkins University. She shares her Nobel with Elizabeth Blackburn and Jack W. Szostak for their studies of the telomere, an enzyme structure at the end of chromosomes that protects it.
Herta Müller
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 2009
This Romanian-born German writer won the Nobel Prize for writings that showcased the harshness of life in Romania under dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu. Themes such as totalitarianism and exile are the threads that permeate her work.
Elinor Ostrom
– Award: Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel
– Year: 2009
Elinor Ostrom was an American political economist whose groundbreaking research revealed that ordinary people can create guidelines that allow for the sustainable and fair management of shared resources. This discovery earned her the Nobel, which she shared with economist Oliver Williamson, a University of California, Berkeley professor.
Elizabeth H. Blackburn
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 2009
The daughter of two doctors, Elizabeth Blackburn studied the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that protects it. She is responsible for co-discovering telomerase, which is an enzyme that replenishes the telomere. She shares her Nobel with Carol W. Greider and Jack W. Szostak.
Ada E. Yonath
– Award: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
– Year: 2009
Ada E. Yonath is an Israeli crystallographer best known for her work on the structure of the ribosome, a cellular particle. As a post-doc fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she started to investigate the structure of ribosomes using X-ray crystallography. Yonath is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 2011
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was the first elected female head of state in Africa. She has written many books and was one of three recipients—along with Leymah Gbowee and Tawakkol Karman—who won the Nobel for efforts to further women’s rights.
Tawakkol Karman
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 2011
A Yemeni journalist, Tawakkol Karman has been involved in demonstrations and actions critical of the Yemeni regime, where democracy is restricted. She has even been arrested, and murder threats were made on her life. Karman co-founded the group Women Journalists Without Chains to promote freedom of expression and democratic rights.
Leymah Gbowee
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 2011
This Liberian peace activist is the founder and president of the Gbowee Peace Foundation Africa. She’s most recognized for leading a peaceful movement, combining both Christian and Muslim women, to help end Liberia’s civil war.
Alice Munro
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 2013
Most of Alice Munro’s books are short story collections set in her home nation of Canada and examine relationships through the lens of everyday events. They are not first-person experiences, but most of them reflect her experiences.
Malala Yousafzai
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 2014
Malala Yousafzai has made a huge impact in Pakistan with her advocating gender equality, specifically fighting for girls to be allowed to receive an education. A Taliban gunman shot her in the head when she was coming home from school in 2012, but she survived and won the Nobel Peace Prize two years later, becoming the youngest-ever Nobel laureate.
May-Britt Moser
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 2014
May-Britt Moser studied psychology and made a crucial discovery that provided insight on how humans and animals know where they are. Moser found a certain cell that determines one’s position; it is close to the hippocampus, centrally located in the brain.
Youyou Tu
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine
– Year: 2015
Youyou Tu extracted a substance called artemisinin that inhibits the malaria parasite. This discovery was crucial to the creation of anti-malaria drugs based on artemisinin. They have boosted survival rates and made a huge difference in health care for millions of people.
Svetlana Alexievich
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 2015
Svetlana Alexievich was born in the Ukraine, and her writing depicts life in the time of the Soviet Union. Her so-called “documentary novels” blur the lines between journalistic reporting and fiction. Her books often take aim at political regimes in the Soviet Union and Belarus.
Donna Strickland
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physics
– Year: 2018
Donna Strickland received the Nobel Prize in 2018, splitting it with Arthur Ashkin and Gérard Mourou, all of whom are instrumental figures in the field of laser physics. Born in Ontario, Canada, Strickland published her pioneering work, along with Mourou, in 1985, which detailed the invention of “chirped optical pulses,” super-fast strobes of laser beams. That technology is now used in laser eye surgeries, machining, medicine, and other applications.
Frances Arnold
– Award: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
– Year: 2018
Frances Arnold was born and raised in Edgewood, a suburb of Pittsburgh, the daughter of a nuclear scientist. After graduating from Princeton University, she conducted groundbreaking research on the directed evolution of enzymes, a process by which specially engineered proteins are created. She’s the first American woman, and the fifth woman overall, to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. She won the prize with George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter.
Nadia Murad
– Award: Nobel Prize in Peace
– Year: 2018
Nadia Murad is a human-rights activist who works in her home country of Iraq to help women and children who are victims of human trafficking, genocide, and other abuses. A member of the ethnic Yazidi minority, Murad was held captive by the Islamic State for three months before she escaped to a refugee camp. She was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2018 with Denis Mukwege, who treats women who are the victims of rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Olga Tokarczuk
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 2018
Olga Tokarczuk was awarded her Nobel “for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life.” Tokarczuk became the first Polish winner of the prestigious Man Booker International Prize in 2018 for her novel “Flights,” which was translated by Jennifer Croft. While Tokarczuk is referred to as the leading novelist of her generation in her native country, she has only more recently begun gaining recognition in English-speaking countries.
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Esther Duflo
– Award: Nobel Prize in Economics
– Year: 2019
Paris-native Esther Duflo shares her prize with her research colleagues Michael Kremer and Abhijit Banerjee (who is also her husband). Duflo has spent much of her career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned her doctorate degree in 1999. Duflo and her partners were awarded the Nobel Prize for their approach to alleviating poverty around the world.
Andrea Ghez
– Award: Nobel Prize in Physics
– Year: 2020
Andrea Ghez became the fourth woman to win a Nobel Prize for physics for her work studying the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. She is the director at UCLA’s Galactic Center Group, where she studies how gravity works near the black hole. “Our observations are consistent with Einstein’s general theory of relativity,” Ghez said. “However, his theory is definitely showing vulnerability.” She shares the Nobel Prize in physics with Reinhard Genzel.
Jennifer A. Doudna
– Award: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
– Year: 2020
The 2020 Nobel chemistry prize was awarded to Jennifer A. Doudna (at left in photo) and Emmanuelle Charpentier. The pair were awarded for their development of the CRISPR–Cas9 gene-editing tools. Doudna teaches at Berkeley and led a team of scientists in using the CRISPR technology to develop a rapid test for COVID-19.
Emmanuelle Charpentier
– Award: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
– Year: 2020
Along with Jennifer A. Doudna, Emmanuelle Charpentier won the Prize in Chemistry “for the development of a method for genome editing.” Their joint award marked the first time women scientists won a Nobel without a male collaborator. Charpentier is a French researcher, and in 2018, founded the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens in Berlin.
Louise Glück
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 2020
American poet Louise Glück, currently a professor of English at Yale University, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Swedish Academy called “her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.” Glück has been the recipient of multiple awards throughout her career, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 and the National Book Award in 2014.
Maria Ressa
– Award: Nobel Peace Prize
– Year: 2021
Hailing from Manila, Philippines, Maria Ressa studied at Princeton University before earning a master’s degree at the University of the Philippines. A vocal and critical opponent of President Rodrigo Duterte, Ressa co-founded online news outlet Rappler and began covering Duterte’s violent administration and the Philippine drug war. The first person of Filipino descent to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, Ressa, alongside Russian journalist Dmitry Muratov, was earned the prize “for [her] efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.”
Carolyn R. Bertozzi
– Award: Nobel Prize in Chemistry
– Year: 2022
Bertozzi earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the faculty of Stanford University in 2015 as a founding member of the interdisciplinary institute ChEM-H (Chemistry, Engineering & Medicine for Human Health). She is presently the Baker Family Director of Stanford ChEM-H. She is generally recognized as the founder of bio-orthogonal chemistry, which allows researchers to study molecular interactions within living things without interfering with natural biological processes.
Along with Morten Meldal of the University of Copenhagen and K. Barry Sharpless of Scripps Research, she received the 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for independent research in bio-orthogonal chemistry that resulted in the development of what is known as “click chemistry,” described as “a form of simple, reliable chemistry where molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently.” This process has been likened to the manner by which Lego pieces can be used to build structures and shapes. Johan Aqvist, the chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, said the scientists’ research has “led to a revolution in how chemists think about linking molecules together.”
Anne Ernaux
– Award: Nobel Prize in Literature
– Year: 2022
Long considered one of the most important and influential writers in France, Ernaux’s body of work tackles weighty subjects, including abortion, infidelity, and the evolution of how women are perceived in society. Ernaux gained international acclaim with the publication of the English-language translation of “The Years,” a multi-genre work that examined, in a loose, almost scrapbook style, the history of France from World War II to the early 21st century through the lens of Ernaux’s own experiences. She has been celebrated for her willingness to delve into the most painful aspects of her own life and to use those experiences as a lens through which to force a reckoning of hope, loss, and regret. She is only the 17th woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Swedish Academy permanent Secretary Mats Malm, during the announcement of the award, celebrated the “courage and clinical acuity with which [Ernaux] uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory.”
