List of female Nobel laureates

All Nobel Prizes won by women (1901–2023)

The Nobel Prizes are five separate prizes that, according to Alfred Nobel's will of 1895, are awarded to "those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to Mankind." Additionally, the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel was established by Sveriges Riksbank in 1968 and awarded to a "person or persons in the field of economic sciences who have produced work of outstanding importance."

As of 2023, 65 Nobel Prizes and the Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences have been awarded to 64 women. Unique Nobel Prize laureates include 894 men, 64 women, and 27 organizations.

The distribution of Nobel prizes awarded to women is as follows:

  • nineteen women have won the Nobel Peace Prize (16.3% of 110 awarded);
  • seventeen have won the Nobel Prize in Literature (14.28% of 119 awarded);
  • thirteen have won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (5.6% of 230 awarded);
  • eight have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (4.1% of 191 awarded);
  • five have won the Nobel Prize in Physics (1.8% of 224 awarded);
  • and three (Elinor Ostrom, Esther Duflo and Claudia Goldin) have won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2.17% of 92 awarded).

The first woman to win a Nobel Prize was Marie Curie, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903 with her husband, Pierre Curie, and Henri Becquerel. Curie is also the first person and the only woman to have won multiple Nobel Prizes; in 1911, she won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Curie's daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1935, making the two the only mother–daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes and of Pierre and Irène Curie the only father-daughter pair to have won Nobel Prizes by the same occasion, whilst there are 6 father-son pairs who have won Nobel Prizes by comparison.

The most Nobel Prizes awarded to women in a single year was in 2009, when five women became laureates in four categories.

The most recent women to be awarded a Nobel Prize were Claudia Goldin in Economics, Narges Mohammadi for Peace, Anne L'Huillier in Physics and Katalin Karikó in Physiology or Medicine (2023), Annie Ernaux in Literature and Carolyn R. Bertozzi for Chemistry (2022), Maria Ressa for Peace (2021), Louise Glück in Literature, Andrea M. Ghez in Physics, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna in Chemistry (2020), and Esther Duflo in Economics (2019).

Female laureates

Physiology or Medicine
No. Year Laureate Name Born Died Rationale
1 1947 Gerty Radnitz-Cori 15 August 1896
Prague,  Austria-Hungary
26 October 1957
Glendale, Missouri,
 United States
""for their discovery of the course of the catalytic conversion of glycogen."
(shared with Carl Ferdinand Cori and Bernardo Houssay)
2 1977 Rosalyn Yalow 19 July 1921
New York City, New York,
 United States
30 May 2011
The Bronx, New York,
 United States
"for the development of radioimmunoassays of peptide hormones."
(shared with Roger Guillemin and Andrew Schally)
3 1983 Barbara McClintock 16 June 1902
Hartford, Connecticut,
 United States
2 September 1992
Huntington, New York,
 United States
"for her discovery of mobile genetic elements."
4 1986 Rita Levi-Montalcini 22 April 1909
Turin,  Italy
30 December 2012
Rome,  Italy
"for their discoveries of growth factors."
(shared with Stanley Cohen)
5 1988 Gertrude Belle Elion 23 January 1918
New York City, New York,
 United States
21 February 1999
Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
 United States
"for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment."
(shared with James W. Black and George H. Hitchings)
6 1995 Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard 20 October 1942
Magdeburg, Saxony-Anhalt,
 German Empire
"for their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development."
(shared with Edward B. Lewis and Eric F. Wieschaus)
7 2004 Linda Buck 29 January 1947
Seattle, Washington,
 United States
"for their discoveries of odorant receptors and the organization of the olfactory system"
(shared with Richard Axel)
8 2008 Françoise Barré-Sinoussi 30 July 1947
Paris,  France
"for their discovery of HIV, human immunodeficiency virus."
(shared with Harald zur Hausen and Luc Montagnier)
9 2009 Elizabeth Blackburn 26 November 1948
Hobart, Tasmania,
 Australia
"for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase."
(shared with Jack W. Szostak)
10 Carolyn Greider 15 April 1961
San Diego, California,
 United States
11 2014 May-Britt Moser 4 January 1963
Fosnavåg,  Norway
"for their discoveries of cells that constitute a positioning system in the brain."
(shared with Edvard Moser and John O'Keefe)
12 2015 Tú Yōuyōu 30 December 1930
Ningbo, Zhejiang,
 China
"for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy (artemisinin) against Malaria."
(shared with William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura)
13 2023 Katalin Karikó 17 January 1955 Szolnok,  Hungary "for their discoveries concerning nucleoside base modifications that enabled the development of effective mRNA vaccines against COVID-19."
(shared with Drew Weissman)
Physics
No. Year Laureate Name Born Died Rationale
1 1903 Marie Skłodowska-Curie 7 November 1867
Warsaw, Poland  Poland
4 July 1934
Passy, Haute-Savoie,
 France
"in recognition of the extraordinary services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena discovered by Professor Henri Becquerel"
(shared with Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel)
2 1963 Maria Göppert Mayer 28 June 1906
Katowice,  Poland
20 February 1972
San Diego, California,
 United States
"for their discoveries concerning nuclear shell structure."
(shared with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Wigner)
3 2018 Donna Strickland 27 May 1959
Guelph, Ontario,
 Canada
"for their method of generating high-intensity, ultra-short optical pulses."
(shared with Gérard Mourou)
4 2020 Andrea Mia Ghez 16 June 1965
New York City, New York
 United States
"for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy."
(shared with Reinhard Genzel)
5 2023 Anne L’Huillier 16 August 1958
Paris,  France
"for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter."
(shared with Pierre Agostini and Ferenc Krausz)
Chemistry
No. Year Laureate Name Born Died Rationale
1 1911 Marie Skłodowska-Curie 7 November 1867
Warsaw,  Poland
4 July 1934
Passy, Haute-Savoie,
 France
"for her discovery of radium and polonium"
2 1935 Irène Joliot-Curie 12 September 1897
Paris,  France
17 March 1957
Paris,  France
"for their synthesis of new radioactive elements"
(shared with Frédéric Joliot-Curie)
3 1964 Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin 12 May 1910
Cairo,  Egypt
29 July 1994
Ilmington, Warwickshire,
 United Kingdom
"for her determinations by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances"
4 2009 Ada Yonath 22 June 1939
Jerusalem,  Israel
"for studies of the structure and function of the ribosome."
(shared with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan and Thomas A. Steitz)
5 2018 Frances Arnold 25 July 1956
Edgewood, Pennsylvania,
 United States
"for the directed evolution of enzymes"
(shared with Gregory Winter and George Smith)
6 2020 Emmanuelle Charpentier 11 December 1968
Juvisy-sur-Orge, Essonne,
 France
"for the development of a method for genome editing."
7 Jennifer Doudna 19 February 1964
Washington, D.C.
 United States
8 2022 Carolyn Bertozzi 10 October 1966
Boston, Massachusetts,
 United States
"for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry."
(shared with Morten P. Meldal and Karl Barry Sharpless)
Literature
No. Year Laureate Name Born Died Rationale
1 1909 Selma Lagerlöf 20 November 1858
Sunne, Värmland,
 Sweden
16 March 1940
Sunne, Värmland,
 Sweden
"in appreciation of the lofty idealism, vivid imagination and spiritual perception that characterize her writings."
2 1926 Grazia Deledda 27 September 1871
Nuoro, Sardinia,
 Italy
15 August 1936
Rome, Italy
"for her idealistically inspired writings which with plastic clarity picture the life on her native island and with depth and sympathy deal with human problems in general."
3 1928 Sigrid Undset 20 May 1882
Kalundborg,  Norway
10 June 1949
Lillehammer,  Norway
"principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages."
4 1938 Pearl Buck 26 June 1892
Hillsboro, West Virginia,
 United States
6 March 1973
Danby, Vermont,
 United States
"for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces."
5 1945 Gabriela Mistral 7 April 1889
Vicuña,  Chile
10 January 1957
Hempstead, New York,
 United States
"for her lyric poetry which, inspired by powerful emotions, has made her name a symbol of the idealistic aspirations of the entire Latin American world."
6 1966 Nelly Sachs 10 December 1891
Berlin,  German Empire
12 May 1970
Stockholm,  Sweden
"for her outstanding lyrical and dramatic writing, which interprets Israel's destiny with touching strength."
(shared with Shmuel Yosef Agnon)
7 1991 Nadine Gordimer 20 November 1923
Springs, Gauteng,
 South Africa
13 July 2014
Johannesburg, Gauteng,
 South Africa
"who through her magnificent epic writing has - in the words of Alfred Nobel - been of very great benefit to humanity."
8 1993 Toni Morrison 18 February 1931
Lorain, Ohio,
 United States
5 August 2019
New York City, New York,
 United States
"who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."
9 1996 Wisława Szymborska 2 July 1923
Kórnik,  Poland
1 February 2012
Kraków,  Poland
"for poetry that with ironic precision allows the historical and biological context to come to light in fragments of human reality."
10 2004 Elfriede Jelinek 20 October 1946
Mürzzuschlag, Styria,
 Austria
"for her musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays that with extraordinary linguistic zeal reveal the absurdity of society's clichés and their subjugating power."
11 2007 Doris Lessing 22 October 1919
Kermanshah,  Iran
17 November 2013
London,  United Kingdom
"that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny."
12 2009 Herta Müller 17 August 1953
Nițchidorf,  Romania
"who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed."
13 2013 Alice Munro 10 July 1931
Wingham, Ontario,
 Canada
"master of the contemporary short story"
14 2015 Svetlana Alexievich 31 May 1948
Ivano-Frankivsk,  Soviet Union
"for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."
15 2018 Olga Tokarczuk 29 January 1962
Sulechów,  Poland
"for a narrative imagination that with encyclopedic passion represents the crossing of boundaries as a form of life."
16 2020 Louise Glück 22 April 1943
New York City, New York,
 United States
13 October 2023
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
 United States
"for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal."
17 2022 Annie Ernaux 1 September 1940
Lillebonne, Seine-Maritime,
 France
"for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory."
Peace
No. Year Laureate Name Born Died Rationale
1 1905 Bertha von Suttner 9 June 1843
Prague,  Austria-Hungary
21 June 1914
Vienna,  Austria-Hungary
"for her audacity to oppose the horrors of war."
2 1931 Jane Addams 6 September 1860
Cedarville, Illinois,
 United States
21 May 1935
Chicago, Illinois,
 United States
"for their assiduous effort to revive the ideal of peace and to rekindle the spirit of peace in their own nation and in the whole of mankind."
(shared with Nicholas Murray Butler)
3 1946 Emily Greene Balch 8 January 1867
Boston, Massachusetts,
 United States
9 January 1961
Cambridge, Massachusetts,
 United States
"for her lifelong work for the cause of peace."
(shared with John Raleigh Mott)
4 1976 Betty Williams 22 May 1943
Belfast, Northern Ireland,
 United Kingdom
17 March 2020
Belfast, Northern Ireland,
 United Kingdom
"for the courageous efforts in founding a movement to put an end to the violent conflict in Northern Ireland."
5 Mairead Maguire 27 January 1944
Belfast, Northern Ireland,
 United Kingdom
6 1979 Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu
(rel. name: Mother Teresa)
26 August 1910
Skopje,  Ottoman Empire
5 September 1997
Kolkata, West Bengal,
 India
"for her work for bringing help to suffering humanity."
7 1982 Alva Myrdal 31 January 1902
Uppsala,  Sweden
1 February 1986
Danderyd,  Sweden
"for their work for disarmament and nuclear and weapon-free zones."
(shared with Alfonso García Robles)
8 1991 Aung San Suu Kyi 19 June 1945
Yangon,  Myanmar
"for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights."
9 1992 Rigoberta Menchú 9 January 1959
Laj Chimel, Quiché,
 Guatemala
"in recognition of her work for social justice and ethno-cultural reconciliation based on respect for the rights of indigenous peoples."
10 1997 Jody Williams 9 October 1950
Rutland, Vermont,
 United States
"for their work for the banning and clearing of anti-personnel mines."
(shared with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines)
11 2003 Shirin Ebadi 21 June 1947
Hamadan,  Iran
"for her efforts for democracy and human rights, focusing especially on the struggle for the rights of women and children."
12 2004 Wangarĩ Maathai 1 April 1940
Tetu, Nyeri,
 Kenya
25 September 2011
Nairobi,  Kenya
"for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace."
13 2011 Ellen Johnson Sirleaf 29 October 1938
Monrovia,  Liberia
"for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work."
14 Leymah Gbowee 1 February 1972
Monrovia,  Liberia
15 Tawakkol Karman 7 February 1979
Shara'b As Salam, Taiz,  Yemen
16 2014 Malala Yousafzai 12 July 1997
Mingora, Swat,
 Pakistan
"for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education."
(shared with Kailash Satyarthi)
17 2018 Nadia Murad 10 March 1993
Kocho,  Iraq
"for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict."
(shared with Denis Mukwege)
18 2021 Maria Ressa 2 October 1963
Manila,  Philippines
"for their effort to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace."
(shared with Dmitry Andreyevich Muratov)
19 2023 Narges Mohammadi 21 April 1972
Zanjan,  Iran
"for her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all."
Economic Sciences
No. Year Laureate Name Born Died Rationale
1 2009 Elinor Ostrom 7 August 1933
Los Angeles, California,
 United States
12 June 2012
Bloomington, Indiana,
 United States
"for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons."
(shared with Oliver E. Williamson)
2 2019 Esther Duflo 25 October 1972
Paris,  France
"for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty."
(shared with Abhijit Banerjee and Michael Kremer)
3 2023 Claudia Goldin 14 May 1946
New York City, New York,
 United States
"for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes"

See also


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