She certainly was among the first to get scientists to pay attention. In her words, she “decided to pick a problem that I could go observing and make headway on, hopefully a problem that people would be interested in, but not so interested that anyone would bother me before I was done.” And it worked. She noticed that stuff far out in galaxies rotated at the same speed as stuff near the center — not what you would expect unless there was far more matter in the galaxy than anyone could see.

Dr. Rubin’s insight was revolutionary, and she received other awards in her career; in 1993, President Bill Clinton gave her the National Medal of Science.

The elephant in the room is gender. Dr. Rubin was not alone in having been overlooked for the Nobel. Every major discovery in the Standard Model of particle physics, perhaps the crowning achievement of 20th-century physics, was awarded a Nobel, except one. Chien-Shiung Wu, who showed that physical laws distinguish between left and right, was overlooked, even though two of her male colleagues won for developing the theory behind her work and an even more subtle follow-up symmetry violation later won the prize.

Of the 204 Nobel laureates in physics, only two have been women — and the first and best-known, Marie Curie, was included only because her husband, Pierre, insisted that she, too, be awarded for their joint work. Prizes and awards usually require a judgment call, and there will almost always be some degree of controversy. But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that the Nobel numbers are skewed.

Does the prize matter? Of course it does. It is important for individuals, for the sociology of science and for science itself. Dr. Rubin was a strong supporter of female scientists. But imagine how many more people she would have reached if her name was also on the list of laureates.

It’s too bad that Dr. Rubin’s lack of a Nobel leads to these sorts of conversations, rather than merely recognition of her achievements. When women are included on any list of hires, speakers or awardees, the people responsible often point with pride to their efforts, as if it were a service, no matter how deserving the recipients might be. Yet probably the only list with a gender component is the one that she’s not on. Dr. Rubin’s work showed that there’s a lot more to the universe than we see.