The Nobel Prizes 2023: Economics & Medicine
Corporate Lessons on Gender and the Thomas Kuhn Paradigm Block on New Ideas.
Article by Gautam Mukerjee
This year, 2 women won Nobel Prizes for Economics and Medicine. Their life journeys are poles apart but represent two halves of the 21st-century Gender Balancing problem – identification and experience.
Dr Claudia Goldin has spent her entire life “identifying” the problem and presenting it to the world, for which she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics.
Dr Katalin Kariko has “experienced” the problem her entire life, relying only on talent, passion and persistence to triumph over humongous odds to save humanity and win the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Dr Goldin broke the glass ceiling to be Harvard’s first tenured woman professor in the Economics department in 1989. She has researched the status of American women in the job market over the last 200 years, identified aspects of the Gender gap and projected the future. In the US, a woman earns 80 cents to a man’s dollar for the same work. The 1970s provided a jump in a woman’s workplace status thanks to the birth control pill, giving her the freedom to plan a career, marriage and have children. However, the problem of the Gender pay gap remained and is still there, with motherhood being the biggest hurdle. Single working women have a smaller pay difference with men than working mothers.
Dr Goldin’s field studies showed employers of college degree holders paying much more for longer working hours than those working flexibly. This is where women are hit the hardest as they do two jobs – one at the office and the other managing children and home. However, the point that hits the hardest is her calling out for “Couple Equity”. Every Gender report across the world categorically states that the professional success of a married woman executive depends mainly on the level of support and encouragement she enjoys from her spouse. This is the bottom line, and Dr Goldin’s “Couple Equity” stands above all else.
The Nobel Committee’s prize for Economics was given to Dr. Claudia Goldin “For having advanced our understanding of women’s labor market conditions”. A lifetime of academic work done to “identify” how women are treated in the workplace has finally been rewarded.
Dr Katalina Kariko did her Ph.D. and worked as a research assistant at Szeged University in Hungary. In 1985, when her research program ran short of funds, she migrated to Philadelphia with her two-year-old daughter and husband. They were allowed to carry only $100 but managed to hide ￡900 in her daughter’s teddy bear. Dr Kariko started as a Post-Doctoral student at Temple University.
In the decades that followed, she fought many virulent forms of Gender bias and rejection. Her first mentor did not want to release her to a better career option at Johns Hopkins and threatened deportation. The University of Pennsylvania kept her at the fringes, demoting her with a pronouncement “not Faculty quality”. Grants were never given for her many proposals, and her research was considered irrelevant. She was forced to retire 10 years ago.
Dr Kariko was hit by a double whammy – Gender bias and Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm bias. Kuhn’s pathbreaking book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” says, “No part of the aim of normal science is to call forth new sorts of phenomena; indeed, those that will not fit the box are often not seen at all. Nor do scientists aim to invent new theories, and they are often intolerant of those invented by others. Instead, normal-scientific research is directed to the articulation of those phenomena and theories that the paradigm already supplies”.
Her passionate belief that vaccines could be made from mRNA or the messenger RNA that carries DNA instructions to the protein-making machine of each cell went against prevailing scientific belief, and Kuhn’s paradigm block kicked in. Senior scientists laughed at her idea. No Grants were sanctioned. Dr Kariko persevered alone. Her reward was lab-work in pursuit of an unshaken belief that she was on the right path, even as she battled cockroaches in windowless labs with countless hours spent trying to solve the bioscience problems that came up. Quitting was never an option. “I am not giving up,” is what she repeatedly told herself.
Fate and a copying machine encounter in 1998 brought her to Dr. Drew Weissman, an Immunologist who was desperately looking for a vaccine against H.I.V. Their different fields of specialization helped homogenize the research data, showing up the limitations in a manner not possible when Dr Kariko worked alone. And the rest, as they say, is History.
The main problem with introducing mRNA to a cell was its immediate destruction by the cell’s immune system, which saw it as an invading pathogen. However, the research pair’s success lay in discovering how the cells protect their own mRNA with a particular chemical modification. They tried making the same modification in the mRNA synthesized in the lab and then introducing it to the cell - and Voila, the immune system accepted it! However, Kuhn’s paradigm block did not, as the prestigious scientific journals Nature and Science refused to print their paper. A niche publication, Immunity, published it in 2005 and finally, their wonderful work was out in the open.
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Interest was shown by 2 biotech firms – Moderna (US) and BioNTech (Germany) with Dr Kariko joining BioNTech as a senior vice president. Clinical trials were conducted for many years using the mRNA vaccine for flu, cytomegalovirus and other sicknesses. Progress was slow but steady, and then came the coronavirus in 2020. Dr Katarina Kariko’s decades of unrewarded hard work helped create the vaccine that saved humankind from destruction after 7 million deaths worldwide.
On the family front, she enjoyed Claudia Goldin’s “Couple Equity”, receiving enormous support and encouragement from her husband, Bella Francia. Together, they raised an Olympian, Susan Francia, a 6ft 2in beautiful daughter who won 2 Gold Medals for the US Rowing Team in the 2008 and 2021 Olympics. Susan did her undergrad and postgrad from the University of Pennsylvania and then her MBA from UCLA. She has started a firm with her mother. Dr. Kariko’s parenting advice is simple, “The best way to raise a resilient kid is to exhibit the trait yourself”.?
The Nobel Prize panel for Medicine describing Dr. Katalina Kariko’s and Dr. Drew Weissman’s research said, “ (it) fundamentally changed our understanding of how mRNA interacts with our immune system and contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times”.
We in the corporate world can take many lessons from the stories of these two brilliant women. Field studies by Harvard, MIT and McKinsey Global have repeatedly shown that organizations that are Gender balanced enjoy a 15-20% higher profitability with better R&D and customer love. Innovation is also more in Gender balanced firms. However, the barrier is Gender bias that comes in many forms – from outright patriarchy to performance measurement indices favoring men. The 21st-century organization has to master these challenges and learn from Dr Claudia Goldin’s research.
Dr Katalina Kariko’s case shows us how Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm blocks new ideas and prevents us from picking up critical market whispers or catching what’s happening around the corner. This will spell corporate death in the fast-moving digital era.
My book “The Ananda Crucible: A Business Compass for the 21st Century” devotes two chapters detailing both these critical issues – Disruption and Gender. You will find similar case studies of Kuhn’s paradigm block for new ideas, field research studies on Gender with women role models repeatedly stating that their greatest strength has been spouse support or, as Dr. Goldin puts it – “Couple Equity”.
Let us salute the two women Nobel Laureates, Dr Claudia Goldin and Dr Katalina Kariko and learn from what they have identified and experienced. It will help us move to the 21st century.
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About the Author
Gautam Mukerjee?is an alumnus of the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta (IIMC). His upcoming book “The Ananda Crucible: A Business Compass for the 21st Century”?is a wake-up call for organizations worldwide to transform and embrace the 21st?Century.?For more on his upcoming book — click the link below: