Bias Interrupted

CHAPTER 1

What’s the path forward?

“I look around me now … there are no other women engineers like me. They just don’t last. They disappear around five years and we keep hiring and have high turnover. I hope before I die to see some improvement.”

—White woman engineer

As so often happens to me—does this happen to you?—I only understood my real message ten years after I started saying it.* A few weeks ago, I was listening to a health economist named Zack Cooper on the podcast Freakonomics.1 He recalled giving a lecture to a huge insurance company, pointing out it could save about 1 percent of its spending, roughly $1 billion, if people got lower-limb MRI scans at the facility nearest their homes. When he left the stage, a senior executive approached ...