Women winning Nobel Prizes and men responding to it

In a thread on Louise Gluck's Nobel Prize for Literature, I read a criticism of an alleged pattern in this week's prizes: "Most of the Nobel prizes this year are women. It looks clearly like ideology is ruling the decisions." Given the Nobel Prize's male-dominated history (Andrea Ghez, the new co-laureate in physics, is only the fourth woman ever to win that prize), it’s absurd to suggest the awards are ideological now but weren’t in the past. But the claim is even false: five men won this week, to four women. As usual when women approach parity with men, men think women are dominant even when men are still the majority. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 8 October)