Patricia Fara is the president of the British Society for the History of Science and a fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. She has an undergraduate degree in physics from Oxford but is one of the many who leaked out of the “pipeline.” In a February 2018 National Public Radio interview, she talked about why she had dropped out of the system. For her it was a choice between quality of life and status. To succeed in science and academia routinely requires a 24/7 commitment. Fara feels that she and many other women have wisely opted for a better quality of life and that “perhaps in time, the really smart men will realize that’s a better option than earning more money but having no time to spend it.”[34] She might be right that faculty at the elite institutions have little or no life outside of work and that getting tenure requires extraordinary sacrifices, especially in one’s family life. Progressive policies such as paid parental leave, high-quality, on-site child care, and tenure ‘clock stops” will improve the quality of living of STEM faculty and make STEM careers more appealing to new generations, but they won’t completely close the gender gap.
In their aptly titled paper “Do Babies Matter? The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women,” Mason and Goulden have shown that women with children don’t advance any slower than women without children. That doesn’t mean having babies doesn’t matter; it matters a great deal. The study showed that there is large gap in achieving tenure between women and men who have babies within five years of getting their PhDs. But most important, based on all the data in their study, Mason and Goulden conclude that “babies are not completely responsible for the gender gap, and that there are other factors at work, perhaps including the thousand paper cuts of discrimination.”[35] Most of these “paper cuts” are a result of implicit bias. They are unconscious, involuntary, natural, and unavoidable assumptions that all of us make on the basis of subconscious assumptions, preferences, and stereotypes.
Implicit Bias
Gender disparities are decreasing in academia. However, many biases and gender inequities remain. This section looks at some of these “paper cuts.” Frances Trix and Carolyn Psenka of Wayne State University examined 300 letters of recommendation for medical faculty. They found significant differences between letters written for men and women. The average length of letters for female applicants was 227 words, whereas the average length of letters for male applicants was 253 words. Not only are the letters for women shorter, they also use descriptors such as “determined” and “dependable” more often and “outstanding” and “brilliant” less often than the equivalent letters for men. Letters for women are more likely to mention family situations and personal characteristics. And here is the kicker: it makes no difference whether the letters are written by men or women.[36]
The peer-review publishing model that the scientific publication system is based on is a single-blind process. Upon receiving a manuscript, a journal editor sends it to external reviewers with expertise in the research area. The reviewers know the identity of the authors, but the reviewers remain anonymous. They read the paper, recommend whether it should be published or not, and identify what changes are needed to make the paper acceptable if it is not quite ready for publication. To examine reviewer bias, Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, Carroll Glynn, and Michael Huge of Ohio State University[37] recruited graduate students to rate conference abstracts authored by researchers with distinctively male or female names. The fake author identities on the abstracts were varied such that the same abstract would be attributed to a male-sounding name or a female-sounding name in a given test. Scientific abstracts submitted by “male” authors were considered of higher scientific quality than those submitted by authors with feminine names even though there was no difference in content. The gender of the reviewers did not influence these patterns. The differences were small but statistically significant. I am confident the same implicit biases appear when papers or presentations indicate that a work was done at a lesser ranked institution or in a developing country, or if the author has a foreign last name. Bias in peer review can affect the publication record of young scientists and impact their chances for promotion and tenure, a painful paper cut indeed.
The reviewing biases discussed here are not limited to graduate students. In 2012, Jo Handelsman and coworkers at Yale University showed that faculty at research-intensive universities favor male students. In a randomized double-blind study, 127 science faculty rated the application materials of a student, randomly assigned either a male or a female name, for a laboratory manager position. They found that “faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student.”[38]
In 1998, Virginia Valian published Why So Slow?, a landmark book on bias.[39] In 2018, she and her coworkers analyzed gender differences in 3,652 colloquium speakers who presented their work at 50 prestigious U.S. colleges and universities in 2013–2014.[40] The proportion of women presenting colloquia was significantly smaller than for those presented by men. There was no difference in the extent to which male and female professors at these elite universities valued or declined speaking invitations. The difference was in the number of invitations offered. These biases have significant consequences, because as the authors say, “Colloquium talks are an important part of academicians’ careers, providing an opportunity to publicize one’s research, begin and maintain synergistic and productive collaborations, and enhance one’s national reputation; those results in turn typically lead to retention, promotion, or greater salary increases. . . . Colloquium talks also signal to audience members who is worthy of being invited.”[41]
Ending implicit biases is not going to be easy. Combating implicit bias is difficult at the best of times, but it is particularly hard in the sciences, where scientists believe that the process of doing science is rigorous and objective and as a consequence are convinced that they are not prone to bias. “Gender discrimination is everywhere,” says Christine Williams, a sociologist at the University of Texas at Austin. “But what makes the experience unique among scientists is their almost unflappable belief in objectivity and meritocracy.”[42] Another complication is the fact that in acknowledging implicit bias against underrepresented groups, established white male researchers have to accept that they may have been privileged in the attainment of their positions. “Some scientists might be slow to consider that the system could be rigged because it implies that their own accomplishments might not be totally deserved,” says Deborah Rhode, a legal ethicist at Stanford University. “They might also be less willing to see how helping their closest peers (mainly males) might simultaneously exclude others.”[43]
Biases can lead to discrimination, a much deeper cut than implicit bias. A 2018 Pew Research Center report finds that the majority of black people in STEM fields (62 percent) report having experienced some form of discrimination at their work due to their race or ethnicity. The survey also finds that half of women working in STEM jobs report experiencing discrimination at work due to their gender, more than women in non-STEM jobs (41 percent) and far more than men working in STEM jobs (19 percent).[44] As mentioned previously, more women working in the Massachusetts biotech sector left their places of employment because of workplace issues than for family reasons. Discrimination does not lead to an inviting workspace, and it encourages scientists with important ideas and skills to leave the field.
Science and Masculine (Over)confidence
Society, and science specifically, rewards masculine (white American) confidence. Numerous studies have shown that in mixed-gender groups, men talk more than women, and that when women do speak they are more likely to be interrupted than men. In contrast, women are considered rude and abrasive if they