Maria Ressa is barely the 18th girl to win the Nobel Peace Prize in its 126-year historical past.

In receiving the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, Philippine journalist Maria Ressa grew to become solely the 18th girl to be chosen for the award in its 126-year historical past.

With half the world made up of girls, the plain query arises: why have so few been granted the committee’s most prestigious prize and, extra broadly, been usually underrepresented throughout the Nobel prizes?

Addressing the criticism, in 2017, the Nobel committee acknowledged its poor observe document.

“We’re disillusioned trying on the bigger perspective that extra ladies haven’t been awarded,” Göran Hansson, vice chair of the board of administrators of the Nobel Basis,

“A part of it’s that we return in time to determine discoveries,” he stated. “We now have to attend till they’ve been verified and validated, earlier than we are able to award the prize. There was a fair bigger bias towards ladies then. There have been far fewer ladies scientists in the event you return 20 or 30 years.”

However he acknowledged different issues, together with the best way individuals are thought-about for prizes. Beginning in 2018, he stated, they might take steps to deal with the imbalance.

“I hope that in 5 years or 10 years, we are going to see a really completely different state of affairs,” he stated.

A complete of 109 people have acquired the Nobel Peace Prize, which has additionally been awarded to organizations. The primary girl to obtain the prize was Bertha von Suttner, an Austrian author who was a number one determine in a nascent pacifist motion in Europe. She was acknowledged in 1905, two years after Marie Curie grew to become the primary girl to obtain a Nobel Prize, in physics.

It might be one other 26 years earlier than one other girl was chosen for the award: the American Jane Addams, thought to be the founder of recent social work and an advocate for the considerations of kids and moms. She shared the 1931 prize with Nicholas Murray Butler, then the top of the Carnegie Endowment for Worldwide Peace.

Different ladies to obtain the dignity embody Mom Teresa in 1979; the authorized reformer Shirin Ebadi of Iran in 2003; the Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai in 2004 and the schooling activist Malala Yousafzai in 2014.

In 2011, three women shared the award: Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the previous president of Liberia; Leymah Gbowee, a peace activist from Liberia; and Tawakkol Karman, a journalist from Yemen who grew to become the face of the “Arab Spring” rebellion in her nation.