Depends on how you define “minority.” No cite, but in college (I was a polysci major) I once read an essay arguing for the position that blacks in South Africa shold be considered a “minority,” because, although a majority in numbers, they were a minority in power.
How many women are in the top rank of scientists in the first place? Women are still a very small minority in physics today. Chemistry is a little better, but men still predominate.
Do you have any theories as to why?
Women just don’t seem to gravitate towards ‘analytical’ fields. I have no idea why. Fields like biology and chemistry, which favor a different kind of thinking (less math, more categorization, empirical study, etc) seem to do much better.
Likewise in computing. It’s interesting that in our office we don’t have a single female software developer on the coding side, but we have a number of comp-sci graduate females who have all gravitated towards the QA/software test side of the field. Again, the breakdown seems to be that the women like the detail-oriented, empirical, categorizing, testing environment, while the men gravitate more towards the analytical side.
I honestly believe it could be a fundamental difference in how our brains are wired. Women seem to be better at organizaton, at keeping lots of tasks going and such, and men seem more single-tracked and focused on analysis. Maybe it’s just the way we evolved - women had to care for the households, raising the children, etc, while men focused on the hunt, or at being good at the one thing that made them a living.
But that’s just a WAG.
The president of Harvard, Larry Summers got himself in a nice little scandal by speculating that there could be some innate differences between men and women that limit the number of women at the top of certain fields. The scandal was overblown IMHO and he only listed that as one possible cause. I don’t think it is inconceivable either and my graduate work was in the neuroscience of sexual differentiation. Any aggregate measure of intelligence shows that males and females are just about equal. However, the distributions are very different and males have a much higher standard deviation meaning that you see mostly males clustered at the very far ends of the distribution. Specific components show differences between males and females as well with males as an aggregate scoring higher on the math and spatial cognition components and females higher on verbal.
Because the Nobel Prize presumably chooses those at the far end of understanding in their field, the outliers would tend to be male if the main criteria is a certain type of intelligence. However, that isn’t the only criteria and there is another big one that also works against females. That type of science career is extremely demanding and makes it hard for women to fit in childbearing and child-rearing without something sacrificed. This impacts male scientists to some degree too but the social demands aren’t the same. Science careers of that type usually mean forsaking anything resembling what regular people would consider a “life”.
Females also have a self-selection bias working against them in terms of numbers engaged in different fields. The number of women in the biological sciences and medicine has grown to the point where there numbers will likely exceed men sometime in the future if they don’t already. Shift over to math and physics and the ratio becomes very lopsided towards males.
I don’t know what the reason is that more women don’t become scientists. It’s irrelevant to the question in the OP though. As I said, people who are currently winning Nobel Prizes entered college thirty-five to forty years ago. At that time, a much smaller proportion of women even considered going to grad school in scientific subjects. Over that period, the proportion of women getting Ph.D.'s in scientific subjects has gone from about 3% to about 25%. It’s too early to even expect the pool of women scientists eligible for Nobel Prizes to be large.
Here’s an article in which someone offers an interesting explanation why currently less women go into graduate work in science:
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
The explanation given in the article is that the intelligent women who could enter grad school in the sciences don’t do it because it’s a terrible, risky choice for anyone intelligent enough to hope to make it as a scientist. You can almost certainly make more money going to medical school, law school, or graduate business school. And as I pointed out, the proportion of women in medical school or law schools is about 45% at the present time. While I think the situation is slightly exaggerated in this article, it’s not too far from the truth. Men, on the other hand, (or so the article claims) are bigger risk takers, and willing to go into science even though rationally it’s a bad deal.