Women are NOT happy working for (chocolate covered) peanuts

Why we pretend female innovators don’t care about money

You have probably heard of Dr Kariko by now. Katalin Kariko is one of the big heroes of Covid-19 vaccine development. She is the Hungarian-born scientist who spent decades working on mRNA which has become the foundation for the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.

This week the New York Times had a big profile on her. It was an excellent piece which did a great job explaining the significance of Dr Kariko’s work.

But it also made me stop and think about women and money.

As someone who has written a book on women and innovation the narrative that is emerging around Dr Kariko is just too familiar to me.

The story about Dr Kariko tends to go something like this:

• Daughter of a butcher. Check!

• Born in communist Hungary. Check!

• Left for the US with 900 pounds sewn into a teddybear. Check!

• Worked on her idea for decades with hardly anyone listening. Check!

• Could not get funding for her research. Check!

• Did it anyway for the sake of the World. Check!

• Was so happy when the vaccine worked that she ate an entire box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts . Check!

Stories on Dr Kariko obsessively mentions things like “she never earned more than 60, 000 dollars a year” or “ she didn’t care about money”. We tell the tale of a heroic woman who selflessly worked on her research in the hope that it would one day benefit the world.

And I have no reason to believe that’s not true.

But it’s not the whole truth.

Economists spend a lot of their time thinking about incentives. How do we incentivize people to work harder? How do we incentivize them to innovate? And when it comes to men we have no problem talking about money as one of these incentives. Nobody feels the need to insist that Steve Jobs wasn’t actually in it for the money.

It kind of doesn’t matter.

But for women we spend SO MUCH TIME insisting that money was never a factor, or that a box of chocolate covered peanuts is all she needs at the end of the day…

I have noticed how most of the articles on Dr Kariko play down (or even leave out) the fact that eight years ago she was HIRED by BioNtech for reasonably BIG BUCKS. It wasn’t like she sat hidden away in a cupboard without money or connections until the pandemic hit.

And playing down the little detail of Dr Kariko becoming senior vice president at BioNtech in 2013 actually makes a HUGE difference. Because the conclusion from Dr Kariko’s story should not be: “thanks to a woman selflessly working away with no money or recognition did we get the vaccine”.

It should be:

“It’s thanks to a company being SENSIBLE enough to FIND, RECOGNISE and PAY Dr Kariko that we have the vaccine”.

Happy Thursday!

Katrine

Ps. I have researched Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts for the sake of this newsletter and can inform you that a box is NOT EVEN THAT BIG.