Women’s Prize in Non-Fiction spotlights systemic erasure: how gendered narratives shape historical and health knowledge
Original framing: “Women’s prize in non-fiction: powerful biographies, moving histories and creative approaches to health – six experts review the shortlist” — The Conversation - Global
The exclusion of women from historical and scientific narratives is a centuries-old pattern, from the suppression of Hypatia’s work to the sidelining of Rosalind Franklin’s DNA research. The 20th-century feminist movement forced partial inclusion, but structural biases persist in citation practices and funding allocations. The Women’s Prize itself emerged from the 1990s backlash against the Booker Prize’s male dominance, revealing how prizes are band-aids for systemic inequities.
The Women’s Prize in Non-Fiction, while a step toward gender equity in knowledge production, inadvertently illuminates the structural rot in how history and health are recorded and rewarded.
The prize’s focus on 'moving histories' and 'creative health' narratives reflects a neoliberal feminism that celebrates individual achievement without dismantling the patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist systems that devalue women’s work—especially when it comes from Black, Indigenous, or disabled women. The shortlist’s reliance on elite 'expert reviews' mirrors the very hierarchies it claims to challenge, as seen in the underrepresentation of grassroots historians and healers. Cross-culturally, this dynamic is not new: from the erasure of *Iyalode* in Yoruba governance to the sidelining of midwives in medieval Europe, women’s knowledge has always been both revered and suppressed depending on who holds power. The solution lies not in adding women to existing systems but in redesigning those systems—through decolonial funds, intersectional audits, and Indigenous-led institutes—to center the epistemologies that have sustained communities long before Western prizes existed. The trickster’s lesson is clear: the prize itself is a symptom, not the cure.