Why don't women win Nobel science prizes? | Hannah Devlin

The men behind the first observations of gravitational waves deserve their prize. But you have to go back half a century to find a female physics laureate

More than 1bn years ago, a pair of massive black holes violently merged, sending ripples across the fabric of spacetime. Humans didn't exist yet when this cataclysmic event took place - yet last year scientists were able to observe the event using a detector made from giant tubes and lasers.

The people who came up with that experiment definitely deserve a prize - and this week, rightly, three of them - Rainer Weiss, Barry Barish and Kip Thorne - were awarded the Nobel prize in physics. In fact, all the science recognised this week is awe-inspiring in different ways. So it seems almost churlish to point out that this year has seen yet another glory parade of "stale white males". The science speaks for itself - does it really matter who did it?