Four women won Nobel Prizes this year – Claudia Goldin (economics), Narges Mohammadi (peace) and Anne L'Huillier (physics) – which brings the total number of prizes awarded to women to 65. That’s a mere 6% of the 1,000 prizes awarded since 1901.

Just over half of those, 35 prizes, have been since 2003. Nineteen women have won the peace prize, three of them Africans: Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan, and Helen Johnson Sirleaf and Leymah Gbowee from Liberia. South African Nadine Gordimer was one of 17 female literature prize winners.

The first woman to win a Nobel prize in 1903, for physics was Marie Curie, for her research into radioactivity. She won it again in 1911. Her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, won the chemistry prize in 1935, also for work in radioactivity.