Nobel Prize Foundation under fire for rejecting ethnic, gender quotas

The vice chairman of the Nobel Foundation's Board of Directors is facing controversy over his comments that the academy won't have gender, ethnicity quotas.

The Nobel Prize Foundation is facing pushback after saying it would not implement gender or ethnicity quotas in selecting nominees. Only 59 women, or 6.2% of total winners, have ever received a Nobel Prize since its inception in 1901.

Göran Hansson, the secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science and vice chairman of the board of directors for the Nobel Foundation, told the AFP in an interview published on Tuesday: “We have decided we will not have quotas for gender or ethnicity. We want every laureate [to] be accepted ... because they made the most important discovery, and not because of gender or ethnicity. And that is in line with the spirit of Alfred Nobel’s last will.”

UN Women, the UN branch dedicated to promoting gender equality around the world, criticized Hansson, saying in a statement, “Unfortunately, the underrepresentation of women Nobel laureates over the years is just another indicator of the slow progress on gender equality.”

Historically, women have been underrepresented in the scientific categories. Only 23 women have ever won Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics and chemistry.