<p>Now of course, the data may be misleading – maybe females are discouraged from say, pursuing physics to the PhD level to the extent that male doctorates on average tend have a better probability of being advanced enough to get higher salaries. </p>
<p>Still, I was also piqued about the situation for academia in general and the intellectual class as a whole. Why is it that the popular stereotype of the eccentric, absent-minded yet brilliant professor is always male? To date, most of what I get for public perception about female researchers tends to be from the promotional material of featuring a minority student in a lab coat looking into a microscope or a test tube. </p>
<p>And of course, when you’re reading academic papers and articles in scholarly journals, it’s only the last names that tend to get fully printed, so rather than “Erin MacArthur” you see “E MacArthur”. The perception probably gets even more skewed for non-English names. </p>
<p>Yet looking at the intake of Ivy-calibre schools (where females seem to fare better in admissions and demographics or more or less even) it’s surprising why the female researcher or intellectual doesn’t seem to be more prominent in the public mindset.</p>
<p>I just had a look at IOP science and the front page had five articles. Three of the articles were authored by asian teams.</p>
<p>What percentage of physics classes are populated by women? Perhaps the filtering starts early.</p>
<p>I read some interesting research on schizophrenia last year on a missing regulatory agent which controls brain development with the hypothesis that the lack of regulation leads to outside the box thinking. That could account for some of the eccentricity.</p>
<p>On a tangential note, calmom, I am amazed how you magically pull research papers that are in html format. They’re so convenient to read!</p>
<p>I haven’t fully digested them. But I did want other parents (and students) to offer their own opinions and insights of course. Have you personally felt it? Is it something that might change with my generation? I mean, thirty years ago, women weren’t swarming all over the Ivy Leagues, right?</p>
<p>BCEagle: I suspect that the percentage of physics classes taught by women may also be a factor.</p>
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<p>The deficiency wouldn’t be sex-linked, would it?</p>
<p>I suspect that there are a number of factors influencing the results of that study and gender inequality in terms of lack of understanding of the impact of child-bearing and child-rearing on what one needs to do in a short period of time to establish one’s reputation and get tenure. </p>
<p>But, here’s a quote from the Boston Globe about a young woman scientist whom we know, who “was recently hailed by CNN as one of “Eight Geniuses Who Will Change Your Life” and by the London Daily Telegraph as among the world’s “top 100 living geniuses.”” [Although I don’t think she’s described anywhere absent-minded].</p>
<p>Yes, gender inequality still exists. Heterosexism and homophobia still exists. If you’re interested in these issues on a human (rather than college/intellectual/etc) level, check out HRC.org.</p>
<p>Women aren’t allowed to be absent-minded. Male profs have wives; female profs have themselves :)</p>
<p>One factor to consider: from the time a student enters college until tenure, it takes about18 years (4 yrs college; 6 years Ph.D. 8 years to tenure). So the relevant cohort of female students would be the one that began college 18 years earlier.</p>
<p>Child-bearing plays a part in women’s ability to secure tenure (or not) or to consider academic careers in certain fields. </p>
<p>Also, it’s been claimed that women tend to go into newer “marginal” fields but that tenure decisions often reproduce existing departments. It’s not necessary for male profs to be sexist to end up preferring a male candidate if that candidate fits in better with their idea of what is important.</p>
<p>If you control for experience(number of years devoted to teaching and research), publications, and other factors, there is no gender bias.</p>
<p>I read an article a couple of months ago that tracked men and women on the tenure track for a couple of years, and it concluded that, women earn the same as men, and they are also offered tenure at the same rate. </p>
<p>The case was different for women who take a break to raise kids, they wont have the same number of publications to be competitive for tenure (when you compare them to males). Academia is obsessed with publications; " Publish or perish". Universities have not figured out a way to take this into consideration when it comes to offering tenure for women.</p>
<p>Also, for a lot of the research fields in the sciences, the researchers are required to bring in outside funding, and part of their salaries are paid with the outside funding, so it is not a good idea to just compare the median salaries (different foundations have different ways researchers can use the money donated).</p>
<p>Right now I’m reading a really interesting book on this subject, called Why So Slow by Virginia Valian. She’s a psychologist who went through hundreds of studies to make the case that there is unconscious gender bias, resulting from our gender schemas, against women in academia and the professional world, and that the accumulated effects of this bias are what result in the inequality we see. </p>
<p>For example, in chapter 7 she cites a study (Fidell 1975) in which “fictitious resume summaries of ten psychologists with Ph.D.s were sent to 147 heads of psychology departments… the chairs were asked to rank the psychologists according to the professorial rank they should be hired at… Four of the fictitious names were female, and six were male. The names were rotated in such a way that the same resume sometimes carried a male name and sometimes a female name. The resumes with male names were assigned the middle rank of associate professor. When the same resumes carried female names, however, they were assigned the entry-level rank of assistant professor. The identical qualifications bought a man a higher rank than a woman.”</p>
<p>That study is, admittedly, rather old, but there are many more from the '80s and '90s that make similar points.</p>
<p>And relating to salary, one of the points she makes in the chapter on academia is this:</p>
<p>“In junior ranks, comparing apparent peers may have the opposite effect: it can underestimate income disparities. If male professors are promoted at a faster rate than female professors, the people in a lower rank will include not only young men and women but also older women who should have been promoted out of that rank. Independent evidence that women are promoted more slowly than men confirms that underestimation of income disparities occurs when gender comparisons are confined to junior ranks.”</p>
<p>Anyway, it’s a highly engaging book and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s interested in further reading on the subject.</p>