ThinkHer

Since the Nobel Prizes were first awarded in 1901, more than 600 men have received the honour in the sciences—physics, chemistry, and physiology or medicine—while fewer than 30 women have been recognised. The imbalance is particularly striking in physics, where, out of over 200 laureates, only four have been women: Marie Curie (1903), Maria Goeppert Mayer (1963), Donna Strickland (2018), and Anne L’Huillier (2023). That means women make up less than 2% of all Nobel laureates in physics—a field that still struggles with gender parity at every level, from classrooms to laboratories. In 2018, when the Nobel Committee announced Donna Strickland’s name, it had been 55 years since a woman last won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Strickland’s recognition didn’t just mark a scientific milestone—it became a moment of reckoning for the discipline itself, forcing the world to ask why it takes decades for women’s brilliance in physics to be acknowledged. Donna Stickland in her lab  Courtesy of Uni...

Clara Belle Williams was the first African-American graduate of New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts. To understand the significance of this, we need to look more closely at what it was like to be a black woman in the early 1900s. It was a time when the very idea of education was a privilege withheld by both race and gender. It was also a world where information technology was still in its infancy, so there was no Google, YouTube or online classes. Knowledge was confined behind classroom or library doors, allowing entry to only those deemed worthy of access. To learn meant persistence: walking miles to schools that lacked resources, relying on scraps of secondhand books, and enduring open hostility from institutions that insisted you didn’t belong. In that climate, the act of studying was not just about curiosity; it was an act of defiance.  Clara Belle Drisdale Williams,  From the exhibition:  New Mexico’s African American Legacy: Visible, Vital,...