Last week, Katalin Karikó was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine for her pioneering work on the mRNA technology underlying COVID-19 vaccines, which continue to save millions of lives worldwide.
She now joins 23 other women who have won Nobel prizes in the sciences, a majority of them within the last 20 years. They include researchers who invented a malaria treatment, discovered the cause of AIDS, and developed the CRISPR method of gene editing. They're all symbols of how far women have come in science, technology, engineering, and math: In the half-century between 1970 and 2019, the share of women in the U.S. STEM workforce rose from 8% to 27%.
