In Sciences, Women Have to Do So Much More for Same Kudos - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Women are rapidly closing the gender gap in maths and sciences, even at the male-dominated top reaches of the subjects.

• But as in so many other fields, women have a much harder time winning the same recognition as men, a US National Science Foundation-backed study by the American Association of University Women reports.

• For instance, in one study of postdoctoral applicants, women had to have to publish three times as many papers in prestigious journals, or 20 more in less-known publications, to be judged as productive as their male counterparts.

• What causes this inequality? Not raw ability (sorry, Larry Summers), as the gender gap in scientific and mathematical ability has reversed in some lands and many studies. But women remain at risk of bias — not just external but also self-inflicted.

• In one study cited in the AAUW report “Why So Few?” high-achieving students who were told before an exam that men do better proved exactly that, and significantly so — while those who were told no difference exists had results that were roughly even.

• A Campos survey of 1,200 female and minority chemists and chemical engineers for the German drugmaker Bayer similarly found that girls tend to have less confidence in their maths ability than boys even when their skills are equal, leading many women to give up on the field and reinforcing (probably subconscious) gender stereotypes among the males who continue in their studies.

• 2 in 3 respondents to the Bayer study said that bias was responsible for under-representation of women and minorities in sciences and math, second only to inadequate education in schools for impoverished students (which presumably applies more to minorities).

The AAUW study

A press release related to the Bayer study

A New York Times report on the studies