“We need to celebrate women physicists because we’re out there. I’m honoured to be one of those women,” Strickland said in a press conference after the announcement at the Nobel institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

Only six women in the entire history of the Nobel Prize have been recognised for their work in the fields of science. Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize twice, once for Physics and once for Chemistry. Her daughter, Irène, was named the Nobel laureate for Chemistry in 1935 for her work in the field of radiation. Other female Nobel laureates in science include Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, who used X-rays to investigate crystals and Israeli scientist Ada E. Yonath, also in crystallogy.

The recognition of Strickland’s work, and the work of female scientists in general, could not come at a more essential moment. Just this weekend a physicist at Europe’s nuclear research centre Cern called physics a discipline “invented and built by men”. Professor Alessandro Strumia also used a series of graphs to show that women were being hired over men whose work had been cited more frequently than their own, ‘proving’ that physics becoming “sexist against men”.

A woman just won the Nobel Prize for Physics for the first time in 55 years