Lawrence Summers, the director of the White House's National Economic Council, got into trouble while he was president of Harvard University when he suggested in a 2005 speech that women may be innately less able than men when it comes to math and science. His sexist comments may have something to do with Summers' background as an economist, a math-heavy profession that was long regarded as reserved for men. Years ago there were only a handful of female economists, and most of them were focused on issues related to women such as gender discrimination.

The situation has changed since then, although there is still a relatively small number of female economists. Women make up less than 20 percent of the nearly 20,000 members of the American Economic Association, and a 1997 study showed that women accounted for just 10 percent of full-time economics professors at U.S. universities, which was smaller than the percentage of women holding full-time positions teaching political science (17 percent), sociology (31 percent) and natural science (12 percent).

But this year, for the first time since the Nobel Prize in economics was created in 1969, a female economist has won the award -- Elinor Ostrom, a political science professor at Indiana University. Although she is a political scientist rather than an economist, Ostrom's research into the management of common property, such as natural resources, is an area of great interest to economists. Another prestigious economics prize, the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded to outstanding economists under the age of 40, was not given to a woman until 2007, some 60 years after it was founded.

Even though there is a shortage of female economists, the fact that it took this long for a woman to win the Nobel Prize in the field could be seen as stemming from gender discrimination. There has long been a certain amount of controversy over gender discrimination in the selection of Nobel winners in the sciences. A prime example is the case of German physicist Lise Meitner, who was part of the team that discovered nuclear fission yet was overlooked several times by the Nobel committee. Marie Curie, who was honored with two Nobel Prizes, and her daughter Irene Curie, who is also a Nobel laureate, are exceptions.

Of the 184 Nobel Prizes in physics that had been awarded as of last year, only two had been given to women. Of 154 prizes in chemistry, only three went to women, while only eight winners of 192 Nobel Prizes in physiology or medicine had been women. The ratio gets a little better for the literature prize, where 11 out of 105 went to women, and the peace prize, where 12 out of 96 were given to women. But the situation has changed this year. A total of five of the 13 Nobel laureates were women including Ostrom. The Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine was awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider, the chemistry prize went to Ada Yonath and the prize in literature to Herta Mueller. It appears that the obstinate Nobel committee has finally accepted the reality of the prominent roles women play in the world today.

By Chosun Ilbo columnist Kim Ki-cheon