http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21639439-women-are-scarce-some-not-all-academic-disciplines-new-work-suggests
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6219/262
From The Economist’s reporting on the paper:
From the abstract of the paper itself:
How many professors were surveyed? How many did not respond to the surveys?
Hmm, so in Male dominated fields, academics perceive people similar to themselves to be more talented.
I wonder how the women feel in female dominated fields? do they more readily identify ability in a female cohort ?
Very interesting post @ucbalumnus
Hunted down the original paper:
*We surveyed faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students (N = 1820) from 30 disciplines (12 STEM, 18 SocSci/Hum) (table S1) at geographically diverse high-profile public and private research universities across the United States. *
The thing is, this definitely isn’t causal. It could be that professors and academics in the field believe that men are innately better and that innate skills are necessary to succeed in their field, and so they discriminate against women (and black and Latino academics). It could also be that because of lower exposure to female, black, and Latino academics in their field, and because of persistent stereotypes about men being innately better at math and science, that the lack of representation in these fields is the causal factor in their beliefs.
The other thing is…it doesn’t have to be one reason. The theories don’t have to compete with each other; they could all be right. The lack of women in science can be (and probably is) partially because of prejudice and stereotypes about women, partially about the long hours and work required (although I buy that argument less, because all academic fields require long hours), and maybe even partially by cognitive differences (that may be partially innate due to evolution and partially developmental differences due to differences in environmental stimulation over their childhood and adolescence. We’ve already established that people make more connections in their brain when they do the same things over and over again, so if we guide girls towards verbal and social skills and discourage them from math and science, it makes sense that they would have diminished cognitive ability in that area and find it even harder to catch up in college in grad school. ON AVERAGE, of course.)
It could be cultural. There could be all sorts of reasons.
There was a paper I read long ago which concluded that how female the professorship is is dependent on how prestigious the field is. They specifically looked at a quant field (math or something like it).
In the countries where that field was relatively more prestigious, there was a smaller percentage of female professors and PhD students. More female professors and PhD students in that field in countries where it had less prestige. Obviously, how difficult math is does not vary by country.
So something is going on. It could be that there is more bias when there is more prestige. It could be that there is more competition when there is more prestige (and either women shy away from or people/society push women to shy away from competition). Or folks are pushed to do things that aren’t really necessary when there is more prestige (so that working 70 hour weeks and weekends is required to gain tenure even though someone can produce good work working 40 hours a week).
Cultural indeed. In Eastern Europe, back in the day, there was more women then men in medicine because women were considered more “empathetic” and therefore better suited to medicine. I also heard that women were better suited for theoretical physics (!) because they were more “imaginative” This was in the 50s and 60s, when American women had a hard time finding professional success in anything besides teaching, nursing and working as secretaries.