One area in which female scientists still have to confront sexism (Nature 468, 733; 2010) is in scholarly awards: women win fewer. Scientific societies must examine practices for selecting awardees.

The proportion of women receiving service or teaching awards in the past two decades is roughly equivalent to the proportion of women within the cohort-adjusted PhD pool in that discipline, but only half of these have won scholarly awards. Using data in the public domain on 13 disciplinary societies, we found that the proportion of female prizewinners in ten of these was much lower than the proportion of female full professors in each discipline (see also P. Leboy The Scientist 22, 67; 2008).