AA Edit | Peace, Eco, Medicine: 2023 Nobels were well-deserved

It is not often that the Nobel awards season ends in such a satisfactory manner as to have pleased so many with the appropriateness of choices made by the committee in diverse fields. The history of the two prestigious Nobels for peace and economics are not without instances of one section of people or other offended.

Claudia Goldin is the third woman among 93 Nobel laureate economists, but the first ever to get the prize on her own rather than as a collaborator in award-winning research. The prize goes to the Harvard University professor for research that has advanced the understanding of the gender gap in the labour market. This is quite a hot subject of the times when gender equality is no more just a vague concept that men tolerated but did very little about.

In an impressive study on women’s labour force participation rate (LFPR) covering 200 years of women in the workplace, Claudia has come to arresting conclusions like women’s pay not catching up to men and the deep divide still existing despite continued economic growth and women gaining higher levels of education than men.

Closing the gender gap in the workplace is no more about feminism or making token gestures towards equality and the men know it too well. The barriers may have been lifted but there is so much more to do to tackle a problem entrenched in mistaken notions of male superiority and chauvinism.

Things may not have gone down too well though in Iran, an outlier in world affairs in more senses than one, when the name of Narges Mohammadi was revealed in Norway as the recipient of the Nobel peace prize. The imprisoned activist won the prize for her campaign against the oppression of women and for human rights in Iran.

The name of Narges may have resonated across the world among those who care for human rights, specifically women's rights as the world knows what the plight of women is in Iran, with only Taliban-ruled Afghanistan surpassing Iran when it comes to denying rights to nearly half the population.

Protests in Iran in the last year or so after the execution of Ms Amini for being overtly demonstrative in upholding the rights of women in shedding the hijab and cutting their hair have shown clearly what the Iranian establishment thinks is the place of a woman in their society governed by theocrats.

Not only were controversies skirted in making popular choices for the Nobel prizes in peace, economics and literature but the pick for the medicine prize was most appropriate in terms of rewarding two scientists who had done much to speed up the delivery of a vaccine to tackle the worst crisis in the 21st century in the Covid-19 coronavirus-induced pandemic that led to the death of at least seven million people and the strangling of the world economy.

Prizes in medicine and science are invariably esoteric, but in picking Hungarian-American Katalin Karikó and American Drew Weissman who helped develop the mRNA vaccine in record time deserved the accolade, regardless of how political the making and distribution of vaccines later proved to be.

The physics prize went to three scientists for their experiments with light capture the shortest of moments, which the Nobel committee said gave “humanity new tools for exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules”, while three US-based researchers shared the chemistry prize for their study of quantum dots. Norwegian writer Jon Fosse was awarded the literature Nobel for works that “give voice to the unsayable.”

Rarely could a set of choices have been as non-controversial as the one this year and the beauty of it is so many picks could be linked meaningfully in applications in the real world.