Giving Compass' Take:

• Donna Strickland’s recent Nobel prize ends half a century in which the committee ignored big breakthroughs by female physicists. The Guardian highlights other women groundbreakers in the field who missed out on the award, but nonetheless deserve recognition.

• What can we do to address the systematic problem that the lack of female Nobel prize-winners represents? How can we support more STEM programs that strive toward gender equity?

• Here's more about the relationship between public philanthropy and women in STEM.

Recently, Donna Strickland was awarded the 2018 Nobel prize for physics jointly with Arthur Ashkin and Gérard Mourou for their work on high-intensity lasers. It’s the first time in 55 years that a woman has won this prestigious prize, but why has it taken so long? We look at five other pioneering female physicists — past and present — who had a genuine claim to the prize.

  1. Jocelyn Bell Burnell: Perhaps the most famous snub: then-student Burnell discovered the first radio pulsars in 1967, when she was a PhD student at Cambridge. T
  2. Lene Hau: Best known for leading the research team at Harvard University in 1999 that managed to slow a beam of light, before managing to stop it completely in 2001.
  3. Vera Rubin: She discovered dark matter in the 1980s, opening up a new field of astronomy.
  4. Chien-Shiung Wu: The “Wu experiment” helped disprove the “law of conservation of parity”, a fundamental particle physics law.
  5. Lise Meitner: Physicist Meitner led groundbreaking work on the discovery of nuclear fission, the splitting of an atomic nucleus into smaller nuclei.

Read the full article and find out more about these pioneering and innovative women by Anna Paul at The Guardian