# List of female Nobel laureates

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);
* eighteen have won the Nobel Prize in Literature (15% of 120 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 Skłodowska-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 Han Kang in Literature (2024), 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).

## Female laureates
### Physiology or Medicine

| No. | Year | 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, 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, Kingdom of 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, 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, Nazi Germany | — | "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, French Fourth Republic | — | "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 | 2009 | Carolyn Greider | 15 April 1961 San Diego, California, United States | — | "for the discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase." (shared with Jack W. Szostak) |
| 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, Republic of China | — | "for her discoveries concerning a novel therapy against malaria." (shared with William C. Campbell and Satoshi Ōmura) |
| 13 | 2023 | Katalin Karikó | 17 January 1955 Szolnok, Hungarian People's Republic | — | "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 | Name | Born | Died | Rationale |
| 1 | 1903 | Marie Skłodowska-Curie | 7 November 1867 Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire | 4 July 1934 Passy, Haute-Savoie, French Third Republic | "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, Prussia, German Empire | 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 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, French Fourth Republic | — | "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 | Name | Born | Died | Rationale |
| 1 | 1911 | Marie Skłodowska-Curie | 7 November 1867 Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire | 4 July 1934 Passy, Haute-Savoie, French Third Republic | "for her discovery of radium and polonium" |
| 2 | 1935 | Irène Joliot-Curie | 12 September 1897 Paris, French Third Republic | 17 March 1957 Paris, French Fourth Republic | "for their synthesis of new radioactive elements" (shared with Frédéric Joliot-Curie) |
| 3 | 1964 | Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin | 12 May 1910 Cairo, Khedivate of 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, Mandatory Palestine | — | "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 | 2020 | Jennifer Doudna | 19 February 1964 Washington, D.C. United States | — | "for the development of a method for genome editing." |
| 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 | Name | Born | Died | Rationale |
| 1 | 1909 | Selma Lagerlöf | 20 November 1858 Sunne, Värmland, United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway | 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, Kingdom of Italy | 15 August 1936 Rome, Kingdom of 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, Zealand, Denmark | 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, Union of 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, 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, Second Polish Republic | 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, Guarded Domains of 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, Romanian People's Republic | — | "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 | 13 May 2024 Port Hope, Ontario, Canada | "master of the contemporary short story" |
| 14 | 2015 | Svetlana Alexievich | 31 May 1948 Stanislav, Ukrainian SSR, 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, 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, Military Administration in France | — | "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory." |
| 18 | 2024 | Han Kang | 27 November 1970 Gwangju, South Korea | — | "for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life." |

### Peace

| No. | Year | Name | Born | Died | Rationale |
| 1 | 1905 | Bertha von Suttner | 9 June 1843 Prague, Austrian Empire | 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 | 1976 | Mairead Maguire | 27 January 1944 Belfast, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom | — | "for the courageous efforts in founding a movement to put an end to the violent conflict in Northern Ireland." |
| 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, United Kingdoms of Sweden and Norway | 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, State of Burma | — | "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, Imperial State of 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, Colony and Protectorate of 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 | 2011 | Leymah Gbowee | 1 February 1972 Monrovia, Liberia | — | "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work." |
| 15 | 2011 | Tawakkol Karman | 7 February 1979 Shara'b As Salam, Taiz, Yemen Arab Republic | — | "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work." |
| 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, Iraqi Republic | — | "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, Imperial State of 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 | 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, United States | — | "for having advanced our understanding of women's labour market outcomes" |