‘We need more women,’ says only female winner of Millennium engineering prize

Women form just 16% of the nominees for next year's award, but Nobel laureate Prof Frances Arnold says gender balance will come through girls working in science from a young age

As a Nobel laureate, Prof Frances Arnold is not short of accolades. Yet being the only woman to so far win the Millennium Technology Prize - the Nobel equivalent for engineers - is one of the least appealing.

Nominations for the 1m 2024 prize closed last week, and the organisers have revealed that women formed just 16.3% of nominees, the highest of any year since the biennial award's launch in 2004, apart from the 28.1% put forward in 2022.