Academic Science Isn’t Sexist

CreditOlimpia Zagnoli

Gray Matter

ACADEMIC science has a gender problem: specifically, the almost daily reports about hostile workplaces, low pay, delayed promotion and even physical aggression against women. Particularly in math-intensive fields like the physical sciences, computer science and engineering, women make up only 25 to 30 percent of junior faculty, and 7 to 15 percent of senior faculty, leading many to claim that the inhospitable work environment is to blame.

Our country desperately needs more talented people in these fields; recruiting more women could address this issue. But the unwelcoming image of the sexist academy isn’t helping. Fortunately, as we have found in a thorough analysis of recent data on women in the academic workplace, it isn’t accurate, either.

There’s no argument that, until recently, universities deserved their reputations as bastions of male privilege and outright sexism. But times have changed. Many of the common, negative depictions of the plight of academic women are based on experiences of older women and data from before the 2000s, and often before the 1990s. That’s not to say that mistreatment doesn’t still occur — but when it does, it is largely anecdotal, or else overgeneralized from small studies. As we found, when the evidence of mistreatment goes beyond the anecdotal, it is limited to a small number of comparisons of men and women involving a single academic rank in a given field on a specific outcome.

In contrast, our work, which is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science in the Public Interest and was written with the economists Donna K. Ginther, of the University of Kansas, and Shulamit Kahn, of Boston University, reports the results of several hundred analyses of data on hiring, salary, promotion, productivity and job satisfaction for eight broad fields of science at American universities and colleges.

Our analysis reveals that the experiences of young and midcareer women in math-intensive fields are, for the most part, similar to those of their male counterparts:

• They are more likely to receive hiring offers, 
• are paid roughly the same (in 14 of 16 comparisons across the eight fields), 
• are generally tenured and promoted at the same rate (except in economics), 
• remain in their fields at roughly the same rate, 
• have their grants funded and articles accepted as often and are about as satisfied with their jobs.
• Articles published by women are cited as often as those by men. 

In sum, with a few exceptions, the world of academic science in math-based fields today reflects gender fairness, rather than gender bias.

Moreover, in contrast to frequent claims that outright bias pushes more women out of math-intensive fields, we actually found a greater exodus of women from non-math-intensive fields in which they are already well represented as professors (like psychology and biology, where 45 to 65 percent of new professors are women) than from fields in which they are underrepresented (like engineering, computer science and physics, where only 25 to 30 percent of new professors are women). Our analyses show that women can and do prosper in math-based fields of science, if they choose to enter these fields in the first place.

So if alleged hiring and promotion biases don’t explain the underrepresentation of women in math-intensive fields, what does? According to our research, the biggest culprits are rooted in women’s earlier educational choices, and in women’s occupational and lifestyle preferences.

As children, girls tend to show more interest in living things (such as people and animals), while boys tend to prefer playing with machines and building things. As adolescents, girls express less interest in careers like engineering and computer science. Despite earning higher grades throughout schooling in all subjects — including math and science — girls are less likely to take math-intensive advanced-placement courses like calculus and physics.

Women are also less likely to declare college majors in math-intensive science fields. However, if they do take introductory science courses early in their college education, they are actually more likely than men to switch into majors in math-intensive fields of science — especially if their instructors are women. This shows that women’s interest in math-based fields can be cultivated, but that majoring in these fields requires exposure to enough math and science early on.

In contrast to math-based fields, women prefer veterinary medicine, where they now constitute 80 percent of graduates, and life sciences, in which they earn over half of all doctoral degrees; women are also half of all newly minted M.D.s and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.s. However, those college women who do choose math-intensive majors like engineering persist in them through graduate school and into the academy at the same rate as their male counterparts — again showing that women can and do succeed in math-based fields if they develop interest in them and commit to them.

Today’s story about women in math-based academic fields is clear. While no career is without setbacks and challenges, life in fields like engineering, physics, mathematics and computer science — when viewed by the numbers across the population of academics today rather than through the lens of testimonials and overgeneralized findings — is life with reasonable pay, flexibility to meet family demands, and the chance to make meaningful impacts on the state of knowledge and the next generation of talented young people. Academic science is a rewarding career for many, men and women alike. We are not your father’s academy anymore.

ORIGINAL: NYTimes

By WENDY M. WILLIAMS andSTEPHEN J. CECI

OCT. 31, 2014

The Magnifying Glass Ceiling: The Plight of Women in Science

ORIGINAL: PLoS
By Jane Hu
August 16, 2013


Scientists frequently reference a quote attributed to Einstein: “You do not truly understand something unless you can explain it to your grandma.” Whether or not these words were actually Einstein’s, they’ve been used again and again to encourage students to explain highly technical details in a simple way so that even your grandma could understand it. The assumption is that your dear old grandma is a feeble-minded lady who doesn’t know anything about phishing or bitcoin or Bayesian statistics.

What’s interesting here is that it’s always your grandma you’re asked to explain things to, not your grandpa. This subtle difference seems innocuous, but it reflects the age-old stereotype that men are more competent than women in math and science. Luckily, we’ve moved forward from the days when women in science like Rosalind Franklin, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, and Lise Meitner had their ideas overlooked or even blatantly stolen, but the undercurrent of sexism has not disappeared – it has just become subtler. 

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin discovered that the sun is made of mostly hydrogen. Fellow astronomer Henry Norris Russell rejected her work…but then published a paper making the same claim four years later. Even though he cited Payne-Gaposchkin’s work, he is still commonly credited with her discovery.

It is true that women are underrepresented in these spheres, but not because women aren’t interested in it or can’t handle the work (for instance, see some grandmas who probably know more than you). Even when women are highly competent in their field of study, their career accomplishments take a backseat to what’s stereotypically a woman’s duty: raising a family.

Take, for instance, the late Yvonne Brill, a rocket scientist (certainly the type of grandma you wouldn’t talk down to). Her obituary in the New York Times began:

She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. “The world’s best mom,” her son Matthew said.

But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist, who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits.

The New York Times has since changed the obituary to lead with a mention of Brill’s career, but the original introduction reflects this trend of subtle sexism. The “but” that begins the second paragraph seems to imply that being a good wife or mom is somehow directly contradictory with being a “brilliant rocket scientist”.

Scientists, too, fall prey to gender stereotypes. In a 1999 study, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee researcher Rhea Steinpreis and her colleagues sent faculty members a CV for a fake applicant’s tenure-track faculty position, and randomized whether the applicant had a male or female name. With the same application, the male applicant was more likely to be hired than the female applicant. More than a decade later, nothing has changed; last year, Yale researcher Corinne Moss-Racusin and her colleagues ran a similar study, asking faculty to rate application materials for a lab manager position. Like in Steinpreis et al.’s study, the male applicant was also rated more highly than the female applicant, and was given a higher average starting salary.

Even if women get that coveted lab manager position or tenure-track faculty position, their research may be less likely to be seen by a wider audience. Last year, the popular journal Nature assessed their own inclusion of female perspectives. They found that women made up only 14% of their reviewers, 18% of their profiled scientists in 2011 and 2012, and 19% of Nature‘s Comment and World View articles. Though there tend to be fewer women in STEM fields to review, write, and profile, Nature acknowledges that doesn’t fully explain the lack of female viewpoints included in their publication. In their own words: “There is work to do.”
This lack of visibility and opportunity can be frustrating, and, according to a 2008 Harvard Business School study, it also contributes to women’s decision to leave STEM fields. Recent research from Berkeley faculty Mary Ann Mason, Nicholas Wolfinger, and Marc Goulden found that STEM fields fail to retain women at every stage of their careers, from undergraduate science courses to professorial tenure review. Data collected by the National Science Foundation found that in many fields, like engineering and biology, women make up more than half of undergraduate students, but this number drops off at each transition point, so that at the tenured professor level, women make up only 20-25% of the total. The most women drop out in the transition between receiving a PhD to landing a faculty position.

Why are women leaving in such numbers? We’ve all heard an urban legend about that one old, misogynistic professor in the department who has explicitly stated his belief that women don’t belong in science, but as the majority of male scientists will attest, there are few men who sit in their ivory towers, intentionally barring women from being hired or published. The story is far more complicated. For one, having more women on review boards does not increase the likelihood that more women will be hired or published. In Steinpreis et al. and Moss-Racusin et al.’s studies, women were just as likely as men to rate the male applicant more highly than the female applicant. This underscores the pervasiveness of gender stereotypes; women, too, can believe that men are more competent. And even worse: they take those stereotypes to heart while on the job.

Social psychologists call this phenomenon “stereotype threat.” This occurs when an individual who is a member of a group fears they will confirm a negative stereotype about their group. A classic stereotype threat study by Spencer, Steele, & Claude (1999) found that women performed worse on a math test if told the test was supposed to reflect gender differences than if they were told it did not reflect gender differences. This works with pretty much any negative stereotype; Yeung & von Hippel (2008) found that women who were primed with the stereotype that women are bad at driving were more than twice as likely to hit jaywalkers in a virtual driving game.

Stereotype threat can affect female scientists’ behavior when interacting with their male colleagues.

More recent research suggests stereotype threat has an effect on women’s perception of daily interactions with fellow scientists. University of British Columbia research Toni Schmader and University of Arizona researcher Matthias Mehl had women in science wear microphones that recorded random snippets of their daily conversations. In rating how “competent” women sounded in talking about their own work, the study found that women sounded less competent when speaking with male colleagues than female colleagues. Presumably, this behavior is a result of stereotype threat: women fear confirming the stereotype of “women are bad at science,” and they falter.

In the face of all this, what’s a woman in science to do? The STEM blogosphere has been abuzz with recommendations. 

• Require universities to adopt family-friendly policies to retain women who are dropping out for family reasons. 
• Provide childcare. 
• Make the tenure process more flexible. 
• Do more scientific outreach for young girls. 
• Create support groups for women to foster stronger mentor/mentee relationships. 
• These are all good ideas, and fit an underlying theme: we need to keep current female scientists in their fields, and we need them to recruit more women to join in the future. 
• Subvert the harmful stereotypes about women and STEM fields that girls hear from a young age: make sure Mattel never makes another “Math class is tough” Barbie, or that children’s clothing stores never make another girls’ t-shirt like this. 
• Be the grandma who does the explaining, not the one who needs to be explained to.

Jane is a PhD candidate in the psychology department at University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on social cognition and learning in preschoolers. She is also an editor of the Berkeley Science Review. 

Follow her on Twitter @jane_c_hu, or check out her science blog: metacogs.tumblr.com