A new study reveals that although women make up over 50 percent of all doctoral recipients in biology-related fields, they only comprise a small percentage of faculty in learning institutions.
The study, by Jason M. Sheltzer of MIT and Joan C. Smith, a software engineer with Twitter, was based on data from university directories and faculty websites and focused on biology laboratories in U.S. colleges and universities. Data featured prominently were from biology departments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Harvard Medical School.
The problem seems to center around the fact that male faculty members hire female graduate students less than female faculty members do. The issue is exacerbated by another finding, that male faculty who have achieved major honors or were funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute or who were elected to the National Academy of Sciences have trained an even smaller percentage of women. This trend was not duplicated in numbers on males hired by female elites, who did not display any bias in their staffing decisions.
By the numbers, the study found that between 1969 and 2009, the percentage of doctorates awarded to women in the life sciences grew from 15 percent to 52 percent. Counter-intuitively, only 36 percent of assistant professors and 18 percent of full professors are women.
The authors refer to this discrepancy as a 'leaky pipeline' in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. In fact, no woman has won a Nobel Prize in science since 2009.
The authors concluded from the study that "Despite decades of progress, men still greatly outnumber women among biology faculty in the United States. Here, we show that high-achieving faculty members who are male train 10-40% fewer women in their laboratories relative to the number of women trained by other investigators. These skewed employment patterns may result from self-selection among female scientists or they may result from conscious or unconscious bias on the part of some faculty members."
Women scientists are also not getting their due on Wikipedia, according to Brown University biology professor Anne Fausto-Sterling and Maia Weinstock, a Brown graduate. They organized a Wikipedia "edit-a-thon" to increase the number of women scientists on Wikipedia. Another goal of the organizers is to increase the number of women who contribute to Wikipedia, since currently only 20 percent of editors are women.
In other disparaging news for men, another study has determined that men are more likely to commit science fraud than women.
