The international journal of science / 16 June 2022

Diversity in science
prizes: why isprogress so slow?

fairer. In mathematics, for example, the International
Mathematical Union, which awards the Fields Medal,
has introduced guidelines to make nominators andaward-committee members aware of unconscious bias.
Many prize nomination forms now include statements
encouraging nominators to consider diversity, and thecommittees that award Nobel prizes have told Nature thatthey are attempting to increase diversity in nominees andthat the proportion of women nominated is rising. No Black
person has won a natural-science prize in the awards’
121-year history, and just 22 women have done so.
However, neither the organizers of the Fields Medal
nor the organizers of the Nobel prizes publish up-to-dateaggregate data on nominators or nominees. Similarly,
these data are not published for awards and prizes given by
Nature. We are taking measures to improve diversity, and,in future, will publish aggregate data on how applications
break down by region and by gender.

Many prize-givers still don’t publish detailsof nominations — a key step towards ensuringthat awards are fair and unbiased.

Prizes boost careers and create role models. But
some of the most prestigious awards are also
among those with the most secretive selection
processes — and that fuels the under-representation of women and people from minority groups
among winners.
At its annual general assembly in Vienna last month, theEuropean Geosciences Union (EGU) did something unusual. The chair of its awards committee, Thomas Blunier,presented a breakdown, by gender, of prize nominees andnominators since 2014. The data were revealing. Although
women make up 37% of the society’s members, they madejust 20% of nominations — suggesting that women are lesslikely to nominate than men. The data also showed thatpeople tend to favour their own gender when making nominations — with men most likely to nominate other men.
This is clearly a problem, but awareness of the situation opens the door to fixing it. Although women are still
under-represented in EGU nominations, their share ofawards is now approaching their representation among
EGU members, thanks to corrective measures taken by
the organization’s awards committee. Sadly, however, theEGU is among the outliers — most scientific societies do
not make nomination data public. They should consider
doing so, because understanding patterns in nominations
and nominees is integral to determining why membersof groups that are marginalized in science remain underrepresented among prizewinners.
Systemic barriers mean that women and people ofcolour, and especially women of colour, are under-represented in science in high-income nations. But this alone
doesn’t suffice as an explanation for award-givers, becauseeven when the imbalance is taken into account, womenremain under-represented in prizes. According to an analysis of 141 top prizes awarded over the period from 2001
to 2020, the proportion given to women fell short of theproportion of female professors in several fields1.
The situation could well be even worse for minority genders and people of colour, but the data needed to assess
this are rarely collected. The authors of an unpublishedanalysis of almost 9,000 winners of science prizes datingback to the eighteenth century (presented at this year’s
EGU meeting, see page 439) managed to identify just one
woman of colour.
That said, some efforts are under way to make prizes

The necessity of data

Prize-givers
need towiden theirnomination
pools.”

Nobel committee members revealed to Science last yearthat women made up just 7–8% of 2021 chemistry nominees2, although this, they said, was double the figure in2018. The EGU’s example shows the necessity of such data
to understanding where imbalances lie and correcting
them. Prize-givers, including Nature, should find ways tocollect and publish nomination data, in particular information on race, ethnicity and country of origin; Blunier notedthat the EGU does not yet record these data.
Prize-givers also need to widen their nomination pools.
In 2019, Nature suggested that award organizers might casttheir nets wider when seeking nominations3 by approaching networks that include academies of science in low- andmiddle-income countries, such as the International Science
Council and the World Academy of Sciences. This is still not
happening on the scale that it needs to. Of the three major
prize-awarding organizations approached by Nature, only
the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, which isresponsible for the Kavli prizes and the Abel Prize, does so;it has done this since at least 2018. Members of the committees awarding Nobel prizes in physics, chemistry andeconomics say that invitations are global, going each year
to faculty members at around 200 of 1,600 universities,
chosen on a rotating basis. However, no information isreleased on their geographical distribution.
Universities can also play a part, particularly in boosting
diversity in awards for which nominations are open, rather
than invitation-only. Institutions can encourage a wider
range of staff to submit nominations by training them in
how to do it successfully, helping them with the administrative burden and encouraging them to put forward
colleagues from under-represented groups.
Sadly, these measures will not make science prizes
match global diversity, at least not straight away. Many
prizes are based on work carried out decades ago, when
the barriers to entering science were even higher than they
are today for people from under-represented groups andcountries. Excellent science and scientists exist everywhere. At the very least, professional societies must ensure.
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Editorials

that their nomination pools are representative of theircommunities. Greater transparency and a wider, morediverse pool of nominees increases the chance of awards
rewarding excellence, rather than amplifying existing
networks of prestige.
1. Meho, L. I. Quant. Sci. Stud. 2, 976–989 (2021).
2. Langin, K. Science https://doi.org/10.1126/science.acx9351 (2021).
3. Nature 574, 295 (2019).

Research must do noharm: new guidance
addresses all studies
relating to people
Springer Nature editors urge considerationof the potential harms of all research relating
to human populations, not just that directly
involving human participants.

In 1971, psychologist Philip Zimbardo set out to examine how the situations we find ourselves in affect ourbehaviour. He put human volunteers in a mock prisonon the Stanford University campus in California.
Participants were assigned the roles of ‘prisoner’ or‘guard’ and asked to behave in ways befitting their roles.
The experiment was extraordinary in its realism — ‘prisoners’ were even ‘arrested’ by local police. Although intended
to run for two weeks, it ended on the sixth day. ‘Guards’ had
subjected ‘prisoners’ to increasingly abusive, dehumanizing and brutal behaviours, causing extraordinary distress(P. G. Zimbardo Cognition 2, 243–256; 1973).
The Stanford prison experiment prompted much discussion about the ethics of psychological research, and rules
were tightened. It could not be reproduced today — ethics
committees and institutional review boards would not
approve research posing such a high risk of psychologicalharm to participants, no matter the potential benefit toknowledge.
There are now several well-established ethics frameworks that govern studies involving human participants,
including the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki (amended mostrecently in 2013; see World Medical Association JAMA
310, 2191–2194; 2013) and the 1979 Belmont Report (seego.nature.com/3mj33xy). But these are generally silent
about the benefits and harms of academic research whose
conclusions could affect groups of people that haven’t
directly participated. Examples include research that could
lead to people being stigmatized, discriminated against orsubjected to racism, sexism or homophobia, among otherthings. Such work might be used to justify undermining.
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The guidance
encourages
authors,
reviewers
and editors
to respect
the dignityand rightsof groupsof people.”the rights of specific groups, simply because of their social
characteristics.
Guidance developed by Springer Nature editors aims tofill this gap in the frameworks (see go.nature.com/3mcuozj).
In essence, it encourages authors, reviewers and editors
to respect the dignity and rights of groups of people.
Specifically, it means at least three things: first, that theresearch community should consider potentially harmful
implications of research as applied to groups; second, thatthe community should strive to minimize the potential for
misuse and the risks of harm to these groups; and third, thatauthors should use respectful, non-stigmatizing languagein their manuscripts.
The guidance applies principles that are already corner­stones of research ethics (see go.nature.com/3anccnr):
beneficence (a moral obligation to act for the benefit ofothers) and non-maleficence (a duty to avoid harm). It takes
as a foundation the first article of the Universal Declarationof Human Rights — all humans are “equal in dignity andrights”. The declaration was adopted by the United Nationsin 1948, following the atrocities of the Second World War,which the international community pledged would neverhappen again.
Editors, authors and reviewers should together consider
and discuss benefits and harms that might emerge frommanuscripts dealing with human population groups, anddiscuss when potential harms warrant revisions. Ethicalconcerns need to be flagged about research that could
fuel hate speech; about potentially denigrating images;
about content that could be used to undermine the dignity or rights of a human group; and about content that
could cause harm in other ways. Although cases are notalways clear cut, if publication risks people being harmed,authors and editors need to consider those risks against
any benefits that could arise from publication.
The past few years have seen several examples of notjust correction or retraction, but also removal of thekind of content that this guidance seeks to discourage.
The removal of retracted content distorts the historical
record, impedes accountability and prevents current andfuture generations from critically examining both the workand our actions. Unless there is a legal or public-healthimperative, content published by Nature Portfolio journals
that is retracted because it was deemed harmful to humanpopulation groups will be labelled with a retraction notice
but will not be removed from the record (see go.nature.
com/3qihqbd).
This guidance is ultimately about protecting people
from harm. It is not about stifling ethically conducted
research on differences between individuals or humangroups, or discouraging work that is socially or academically controversial. Science has for too long been used
to prop up structural inequalities and discrimination insociety, perpetuating injustice. Our guidance takes a step
towards countering this. Academic freedom is a fundamental and non-negotiable premise of scholarship. However,
it is not without limits. All academic research requires
ethical consideration to maximize benefits and reduceor eliminate harms.