Fast Company dishes out the dark tidings today, with an article on the dearth of women getting jobs in the sciences.  They essentially conclude that the reason women find it difficult to succeed in scientific fields is because there are very few women with jobs in the scientific fields.
At every milestone on the educational path–early mathematics, college, research grants, and professional careers–the guiding hand of a fellow woman increases the likelihood of smashing the glass ceiling…
The downward pressure exerted on female scientists is an ugly, methodical system that can be traced from adulthood as it trickles all the way down to impressionable young girls…
Decades of professional exclusivity left a gap, in the sciences, in the number of women sitting on all-important grant funding committees. Despite the objective veneer of the hard sciences, a new study shows women are far more likely to get funded if another women is on the committee. Sociologist Anne Lincoln contends that female grant solicitations tend to include autobiographical content and use terms such as “cooperative” and “dependable,” rather than words that, unwittingly, appeal to men, like “decisive” and “confident.”
Studies have shown that an unconscious perception that women are not as suited for the sciences as men causes students to give teachers lower scores in course evaluations simply because of their gender. However, simply adding female science and math teachers to schools regardless of their personal suitability for the job has been shown to backfire:
by the end of the year, the more anxious teachers were about their own math skills, the more likely their female students–but not the boys–were to agree that “boys are good at math and girls are good at reading,
But, this is the sciences, and so research is providing solutions.
For instance, female medical students were far more likely to take leadership positions in small class discussions if teachers gave a pep talk about the importance of initiative before discussion. “Our findings show that how we instruct our students can strongly influence whether we reinforce or eliminate gender bias in class leadership,” UCLA professor of Physiology Nancy Wayne, said in a UCLA newsletter.
Research also shows the women tend to close the gap in achievement and class participation in web-based courses, where it is not as obvious who anyone’s gender is.
(via Skepchick.)
