The Gender Imbalance in Science — 4/2/17
Women, overall, are underrepresented in science. If we look more closely at the data, however, we find that the issue of gender imbalance is more subtle. Fields such as psychology, biosciences, and the social sciences (excluding economics) exhibit gender parity. On the other hand, women are vastly underrepresented in areas such as mathematics, physics, engineering, and economics. How can we explain this phenomenon?
In this reading group, we’ll focus on the acclaimed paper “Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines” by Leslie et al., which provides a hypothesis for the gender distribution in the sciences. In addition, I’ve included a couple smaller articles and a data booklet to set the stage for discussion. My goal for the discussion, however, is to dive deep into the ideas that Leslie et al. propose, and to assess their implications for tackling the problem of gender imbalance in science.
All Readings
(1) An NSF data booklet that provides a variety of statistics on the representation of women, minorities, and persons with disabilities in the sciences and engineering. Section 2 is of particular interest to us.
(2) “Scientists must work harder on equality” by astronomer Meg Urry. This article provides some statistics on representation of women in academia and provides additional context for our discussion.
(3) “Gender inequality in science” by sociologist Andrew Penner. This “Perspective” in the journal Science was written specifically to introduce and provide context for Leslie et al.’s paper.
