We Can't Get Rid of Bias — But We Can Disrupt It by Design

In 2017, all nine people who won the Nobel Prize in the sciences were men. Historically, 97 percent of Nobel laureates in the sciences have been men, mostly from Western countries. Then, in 2018, something happened. For the first time, two female scientists won the Nobel Prize in the same year: the Canadian physicist Donna Strickland and the American chemical engineer Frances H. Arnold. In addition, the human rights activist Nadia Murad, a Yazidi woman from Iraq, received the Nobel Peace Prize. These women, like so many before them, had done amazing work worthy of such high acclaim, but they were among the first to be recognized.