Nobel prize winners far more likely to come from wealthy families highlighting inequality in the sciences

Major discoveries and significant progress may be being lost because of unequal opportunity in the sciences, a study looking at the childhood socioeconomic status of Nobel laureates has concluded. However, over the more than 120 years the Nobel prize has been running, some progress has been made in creating opportunity for people who do not have wealthy parents.

The researchers behind the study, who were based in the US and UK, set out to study opportunity by collecting biographical data on Nobel prize winners from 1901–2023 covering 739 winners in chemistry, physics, medicine and economics. For each winner they collected demographic information and parents’ occupations as a measure of the laureate’s childhood socioeconomic status.

They were able to successfully identify fathers’ occupations for 715 of the winners but only found information on the mothers of 181, so decided to focus on the fathers’ occupations only.

Using this information, the researchers assigned each laureate a socioeconomic rank from 0–100 using US Census data on average income and education levels of adult males with occupations to provide a benchmark for studying access to opportunity. They calculated income and education ranks for each occupation category in each decade and then matched them to the prize winners’ birth decades and fathers’ occupations.

Overall, their findings showed that Nobel laureates are largely drawn from elite families. The average laureate had a father in the 87th income percentile and the 90th education percentile with the most common profession being business owner.

Improving opportunity

The analysis showed that the income range from which laureates are drawn has approximately doubled since 1901. In 1901, the average winner was from a 92nd-income percentile family, whereas today the average winner comes from an 85th-income percentile family (the mean education rank fell from 95th to 88th over the same period). This, the researchers write, represents a substantial increase in access to opportunity at the very top of the sciences, although at this rate it will be another 688 years before socioeconomic background has no impact on winning a Nobel.

‘An exciting thing about working on this is we have a 122-year time series of data collected in the same way,’ says Paul Novosad, an economist at Dartmouth College in the US, and lead author of the study. ‘So, we can actually say, “Have we done any better at creating opportunities for smart people who weren’t lucky enough to have well-off parents?”, and our study suggests the answer is yes.’

Although Novosad points out that the fact that the average laureate comes from the 87th income percentile, which still suggests a lot of people are potentially missing out.

For female laureates, of which there were only 28 in the dataset, they found that a higher proportion came from elite families (91st income percentile compared with 87th for men) suggesting some of the barriers to advancement in the sciences faced by women might be alleviated by wealth.

‘There are more barriers to success facing women and so you need to start from more of an advantage to end up in the same place … parent background can help bridge some – far from all – of those barriers,’ says Novosad.

What kind of childhood makes a top scientist? Is it enough to have all the right traits (brilliance, grit, etc) or do you need the right family too?

And why should we care? A 🧵 on our paper on the Nobel Laureates.

A teaser: the income distribution of the laureates' fathers.1/N pic.twitter.com/SDI0HzSbts

— Paul Novosad (@paulnovosad) October 9, 2024

And while barriers were higher for women, the data suggests they were lower for Americans. On average US-born laureates were found to come from less wealthy families than winners born in Europe and the rest of the world, suggesting more equal access to opportunity in the sciences in the US than in the rest of the world.

Global income

Acknowledging the fact that focusing just on the father’s occupation ignored the substantial difference in opportunity across countries, the researchers then extended their analysis to include the country in which the laureates were born, in addition to their father’s occupation. They then constructed a synthetic global income distribution, taking into account the GDP per capita of each winner’s childhood country.

They described the results as ‘stark’. The average Nobel prize winner came from the 95th percentile and there has been no real improvement since 1901. This, they said, implied that ‘the vast majority’ of the world’s best scientific talents were growing up in places that prevented them from ‘achieving their potential and sharing it with humanity’.

‘A lot of people would have hoped that we would see more improvement over 125 years and we haven’t,’ says Novosad. ‘There’s definitely major scientific discoveries that are being lost by virtue of us not having adequate education and opportunity systems in the developing world.’

Novosad says some of the problem is the elitism that exists in academia and in evaluating people based on where they went to university and where they did their PhDs, much of which is linked to parental income. ‘I’m sure we could do a lot better at finding talented people from humble backgrounds. One way to do that is to recognise that a lot of the shortcuts that we use for evaluating people’s quality, like which institution are you at, are essentially causing us to miss a lot of people.’

Roger Turner, a science historian at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia, US, says he was ‘initially sceptical’ of this paper as Nobel prize winners make for an ‘idiosyncratic data set’ – a point noted in the paper. ‘The Nobel prize, as laid out in Alfred Nobel’s will, is built around a really old-fashioned idea of how science works – the idea that science progresses by discrete, recognisable moments of discovery, performed by one or at most three people,’ he adds. ‘This isn’t how modern science works.’

However, he says that he eventually concluded that the study was an ‘innovative’ one that makes the cases that social inequality hampers science. ‘It challenges the racist and sexist notions that scientific accomplishment is somehow genetically determined,’ he says. ‘Most surprising to me was the finding that areas characterised by above average upward and downward economic mobility produce more Nobel winners.’

Turner says it is ‘crucial’ to make science accessible as a career to as many people as possible and create ‘stable mechanisms’ that can support anyone with drive and talent in science, not just those from well-off families. ‘This kind of quantitative work is most valuable when it’s joined to research that can include the texture of history,’ he adds.