PZ Myers. 2005 Jul 13. The cost of being a woman in science. <http://pharyngula.org/index/weblog/the_cost_of_being_a_woman_in_science/>. Accessed 2008 Nov 20.
Posted on M00o93H7pQ09L8X1t49cHY01Z5j4TT91fGfr on Wednesday, July 13, 2005
The cost of being a woman in science
This week's Nature includes a letter with a provocative title.
Mysterious disappearance of female investigators
Darach Watson, Anja C. Andersen and Jens Hjorth
Don't expect CNN or Fox to add this to their lineup of "Where the Women At?" stories though—it's just another troubling example of discrimination.
The results of the first year's European Young Investigator (EURYI) awards are worrying. The awards provide 25 young scientists with up to €1.25 million to establish research teams in Europe. Only three of the 25 initial recipients were women, far below the percentage working in science at the targeted career stage. This was not because women didn't apply in sufficient numbers: nearly a quarter of the applicants were female. Rather, male applicants were twice as likely to succeed.
EURYI applications were first submitted to the relevant national research councils, who could nominate a specific number of candidates. This selection cut the proportion of women from one-quarter to one-fifth. Each national research council oversaw a drop in the number of selected women. In Spain, where nearly a third of the applicants were women, not one was nominated. The all-male Spanish list emerged with the highest success rate in the later European rounds, nearly three times the average. From 133 national nominees, European evaluation committees created a shortlist of 67, causing the largest drop in the proportion of women: 9.9±0.5% of men applying made the European shortlist, but only 4.7±1.4% of women did.
The working paper Evaluation of the EURYI Awards Scheme by L. Langfeldt and K. E. Brofoss (NIFU STEP, Oslo, 2005), commissioned by the European Science Foundation (ESF), with access to a limited data set including assessments of candidates at the European evaluations and sample applications, recently concluded: "the main problem remains that the scheme ... attracts far fewer female applicants". The report also suggested that "female applicants had a somewhat higher tendency to be filtered out" at the domestic level but that there was "no evidence of bias" at a European level.
However, the statistics are clear: the consistent attrition of women at each stage, and the large size of the sample, mean that women's lack of success cannot have occurred by fluke. The random chance probability of halving the female fraction from one end of the competition to the other is only 0.05%.
The 'leaking pipe' phenomenon (in which a disproportionate number of women leave the sciences at each career stage) is often attributed to a complex array of external factors that cause women to drop out. In this case, we believe we are seeing a leaking pipe in the stages of a single competition. Does this mean more straightforward explanations for the career leakage may be possible?
Without a detailed knowledge of applications and judging criteria, it is impossible to nail down the underlying reasons for the inequality in the awards. We would like to replicate the groundbreaking analysis of Christine Wennerås and Agnes Wold ("Nepotism and sexism in peer review" Nature 387, 341−343; 1997) at the European level, but the ESF has so far been unwilling to release the necessary data to us.
We consider that this attrition demands further independent scrutiny to uncover the cause.
I know that some will try to claim that it's merely a consequence of women's relative lack of ability to perform at higher level scientific levels, but that link to the Wennerås and Wold article (which should work for everyone, it's to a copy not at Nature) puts paid to that idea. The authors had access to the peer-review evaluations of grants submitted to the Swedish Medical Research Council, which include a score the reviewer gave for scientific competence. In these grants, women scored particularly poorly on competence compared to men, so the authors evaluated their real world performance more objectively, examining publications, journal impact scores, etc. The result was an eye-opener for me.
Did men and women with equal scientific productivity receive the same competence rating by the MRC reviewers? No! As shown in Fig. 1 for the productivity variable ‘total impact’, the peer reviewers gave female applicants lower scores than male applicants who displayed the same level of scientific productivity. In fact, the most productive group of female applicants, containing those with 100 total impact points or more, was the only group of women judged to be as competent as the least productive group of male applicants (the one whose members had fewer than 20 total impact points).
They also carried out a multiple regression analysis to try to identify the factors that were most predictive of the competency assessment by the grant reviewers.
Three out of six productivity variables generated statistically significant models capable of predicting the competence scores the applicants were awarded: total impact, first-author impact and first-author citations. The model that provided the highest explanatory power was the one based on total impact (r2=0.47). In all three models, we found two factors as well as scientific productivity that had a significant influence on competence scores: the gender of the applicant and the affiliation of the applicant with a committee member.
How much of an impact do you think applicant gender has on their competency evaluation? They were able to quantify that, and it's dreadful.
According to the multiple-regression model based on total impact, female applicants started from a basic competence level of 2.09 competence points (the intercept of the multiple regression curve) and were given an extra 0.21 points for competence. So, for a female scientist to be awarded the same competence score as a male colleague, she needed to exceed his scientific productivity by 64 impact points (95 per cent confidence interval: 35-93 impact points).
This represents approximately three extra papers in Nature or Science (impact factors 25 and 22, respectively), or 20 extra papers in a journal with an impact factor of around 3, which would be an excellent specialist journal such as Atherosclerosis, Gut, Infection and Immunity, Neuroscience or Radiology. Considering that the mean total impact of this cohort of applicants was 40 points, a female applicant had to be 2.5 times more productive than the average male applicant to receive the same competence score as he ((40+64)/40=2.6).
Gah. That's some leaky pipe. I feel like I have to apologize to all of my female colleagues now for benefitting from this bias, even though it's not entirely men's fault, directly: the article also mentions that other studies have found both male and female reviewers deprecate their evaluation of women's applications (there were relatively few female reviewers in this sample).
The authors have one suggestion for correcting the problem: end anonymous review and open up the process to more thorough inspection. I can see the virtue of anonymous review in that it makes it easier to criticize the work of the powerful, but it's clear it also masks patterns of chronic abuse. They've convinced me, at any rate.
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Re: Anonymous peer review.
People often cite their own work. In my field, its common to write manuscripts in first person. For example, I would write: "In our previous paper (Kaisare et al, 2003)..." How would one ensure anonymity of the authors during the review process?
An advantage is that the number of incremental publications will come down, as the reviewer may tag the next "increment" as a plagiarism instead of extension of the previous work.
Perhaps a way around possible abuse is the identity be revealed after the reviewer sends in his/her reviews and then give an opportunity to append to the review.
Just thinking aloud. -
Is there some reason that this sort of competition could not be run with submissions that provided the various levels of reviewers with no gender info?
Symphony orchestras tryouts used to be affected (infected?) with the same male bias. Then they moved to "blind" tryouts, where the candidates could be beautifully heard, but not seen at all, by the judges. Hires of women went up immediately...#: Posted by on 07/13 at 01:50 PM -
The problem with making submissions anonymous or gender cloaked that many fields are small enough that evidence of your work, such as your list of pubs, can't be evaluated without unmasking you, even if you only ever use initials. Your scientific record is not like a performance, you cannot hide behind a screen.
I have sometimes argued with colleagues that journal manuscript reviews should be completely anonymous - neither reviewer or author identified - that could be done and would improve fairness all around.#: Posted by on 07/13 at 02:12 PM -
Very interesting study. I need to bookmark this post for next time someone brings up Summers.
#: Posted by on 07/13 at 02:14 PM
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So the old line about how a woman has to be twice as competent as a man to be thought half as competent is, in fact, not quite right. She has to be two and a half times as competent...This is rather discouraging. I notice that in both cases the data is from Europe. Is there any similar data from the US?
#: Posted by on 07/13 at 02:28 PM
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God, that's pretty damning. Does anyone know of roughly comparable data for the US? I'd like to think this problem is no longer _quite_ as bad here, (though I must say that my sister, a developmental biologist and currently an assistant professor at a major university, has definitely run into a couple of instances of pretty undisguised sexism), but I'd sure feel better if there were data to back up that hope. Oh well, as an ex-academic, at least I don't have to feel guilty like PZ. ;)
#: Posted by on 07/13 at 02:28 PM
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Steve asked the same question as me at about the same time. My impression, for what it is worth, is that the US does suffer from a good deal of sexism, although whether more or less than Europe I couldn't say. I can contribute one minor piece of data concerning the question: When I was an undergraduate one of my professors made the statement that women spoke less often in class than men. He did not give any evidence to back this statement, however. Therefore, being a good little nerdling, I set about to test the hypothesis. I counted the number of women and men in each of my classes and kept track of the number of times someone of either gender spoke and whether the person volunteered to answer a question or was specifically asked by the professor to answer the question. (To avoid influencing the results, I didn't volunteer in any of the classes I studied, nor was I ever asked to speak.) The results were interesting: Men and women spoke about equally often. However, when a professor asked a particular person to speak on an issue, that person was about twice as likely to be a man as a woman. I repeated the survey in medical school with the same results. My conclusion was that women did speak as often as men but that men were more likely to be noticed by the professors. Of course, the data are very close to anecdote, so I wouldn't want to try to draw too many conclusions from them.
#: Posted by on 07/13 at 02:37 PM
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And my advisors wonder why I have all but given up on a career in science, sigh.
GrrlScientist#: Posted by GrrlScientist on 07/13 at 02:39 PM -
Anonymous review is probably not possible, unless you try to eliminate the consideration of institutional environment, publications (as Niket says, people cite their own papers in grants as evidence of the soundness of their preliminary data), etc. No, reviewers on study sections are quite likely to be familiar with who's doing what kind of work in their field (which is exactly one of the reasons reviewers are chosen for study sections in the first place, for their expertise in their field), etc. In any case, when it comes to grants, factors that mean a great deal in addition to the quality of the preliminary data and proposal itself are the PI's track record in publications, his/her collaborators, and his/her academic envrionment, all of which are pretty difficult to anonymize.
On the other hand, anonymous review of manuscripts submitted to journals should be possible. This has always been one of my pet peeves. There's a lot of stuff that makes it into Science, Nature, and Cell that wouldn't make it there if it didn't come from certain well-established investigators or from certain institutions. -
I don't think review of anonymous submissions is at all possible. There are just too many cues available, and often in specialized fields the number of investigators is so small that they all know each other.
What is proposed is that the practice of anonymous reviews be ended. The reviews should be accessible to researchers, as well, so that they can analyze them, and the pattern of reviews by Old Dr. Jones is found to be grossly sexist against women, discriminatory to Asians, and favors only former students, then maybe it would be a good idea for journals to stop asking Jones to review papers. -
If competence can be measured more-or-less quantitatively, why would that not be one of the fixes used? I know there are arguments about whether, say, # of citations also should be looked at, not just # of publications, but I periodically see something like this: why look! We will take a quantitative scale and compare those numbers with the competency scores that are given holistically, and wow! as it turns out, women need to publish 78 times more to be judged equally competent! Who'd've thunk it? (Except all the other studies which showed the same thing, only on different groups of women.)
I grant this wouldn't do well for things like articles, but I'm not sure why it couldn't be enacted for awards. - I think that would also have potential for abuse, though -- it means we'd reduce each person to a number, and then wouldn't you expect that, for instance, journals would rather publish some who is a 282 than someone who is a 17? And you also know that there would be great incentive to game the system, even more than there is now.
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...journals would rather publish some who is a 282...
Funny, you don't look Twoish.#: Posted by Ron Sullivan on 07/13 at 07:40 PM -
I just can't see this being that much *worse* a syste (for grants & awards, anyhow: yes, there becomes some risk of only publishing the high number people, but aren't those the people who tend to get published *anyhow*?) It's an imperfect system, true, but it's also more open. I admit I can't offhand figure out how to game the syste (except by carefully deciding on weights of things initially), but even then, it seems like it will be less heavily biased.
This study result seems much like the peer-reviewed version of "where are the woman bloggers?". -
There's plenty of evidence to suggest that establishing a 'tyranny of numbers' with respect to many types of evaluation (i.e. evaluation for acceptance to academic institutions, hiring, and so forth) is far better than relying on 'soft' evaluation techniques ('professional judgement', performance in interviews). For instance, student performance is better predicted by a combination of grades plus test scores than a combination of grades plus test scores plus an evaluation based on an interview (i.e. introducing the subjective component undermines the quality of evaluation rather than enhancing it).
This observation extends to all sorts of decisions (not necessarily restricted choosing people for positions, etc.), and there's plenty of reason to suppose that coming up with formulaic criteria for grants and awards, and eliminating that smacks of pure 'professional judgement' (any sort of holistic evaluation that can't be broken down into weighted criteria) would not only reduce gender discrimination but also generally lead to better award choices overall.
Certainly, there'd be opportunities to game the system, but I imagine such opportunities exist anyway.#: Posted by on 07/13 at 08:10 PM - There is comparable data for the USA, but it's 20 to 30 years old. In one study from 1987, researchers took several hundred professors and randomly divided them into three groups. They gave all professors an identical paper to review, but the author byline was different for all three groups: for one it was a clearly male name, for another it was clearly female, and for the third it was only an initial. The professors who got the male name gave the paper much higher scores than those who got the initial, who gave much higher scores than those who got a female name; this bias applied to male professors and female professors alike.
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Alon: Thanks for the info. Do you know who the authors of the study were or have a reference for it? I'd like to see the original article. Since the objective measures of success used in the Wold article included number of papers published and quality of the journals in which they were published, the study you reference suggests that the bias is even greater than they stated--it's harder for women to get published and when they do the results are downgraded simply because of their gender.
#: Posted by on 07/14 at 04:34 AM
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http://www.awm-math.org/articles/notices/199107/billard/node5.html
I was wrong about the year; the study in question was done in 1983.
Another interesting point included in the same link is that immediately after classics conferences made paper submissions anonymous in 1974, the number of women who got their papers accepted soared. -
Is this also true of engineering schools? If so, it would partly explain why my father told me I "wasn't enough of a bitch" to be an engineer. Partly.
#: Posted by on 07/14 at 07:23 AM
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Speedwell: My opinion is that it is easier for a woman to get an academic position and tenure in an engineering school. Perhaps because there are so few women professors in engineering, and the schools are looking to increase the diversity. But perhaps its harder for her to get a mediocre paper published than her male peers.
No data... just my hypothesis. -
on the pharyngula rss feed, the title on this post appears as
"The cost o' bein' a wench in science" (it runs through pz's "piratizer" for some reason). i know i shouldn't laugh but i had to, given the context of the article
#: Posted by on 07/14 at 08:12 AM - Niket: on the contrary, engineering schools discriminate against women more than other schools. A comprehensive study about women at Stanford shows that while in science women get the same lab space as men of equal qualifications, in engineering there is clear evidence of discrimination.
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Alon: Thanks for the link.
#: Posted by on 07/14 at 10:57 AM
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A personal experience-
In the 50s, at a special NYC high school, other art applicants and I were asked to bring a portflio of our works in accordance with careful instructions of how to identify them so the critics could not see our names. The music applicants performed in a studio where their critics could not see them. At the end of the day we shared our opinion of the selection process. The ubiquitous response was "...harsh, but fair."
With a little creativiity there could be an anonymous assessment of someone's work. If, for example, a department chairman or a journal editor wanted to override a blind assessment, that could be done, but at least there would be a paper trail of that blind assessment.#: Posted by on 07/14 at 02:06 PM -
Both the study PZ and Alon refers to says that both male and female reviewers discriminates females.
Why?#: Posted by on 07/14 at 03:17 PM - Because we live in a culture that repeats over and over again that women aren't as competent, and both men and women absorb that message.
- I can tell you for a fact that in the US, a lot of women who dreamed of lives as bench scientists left because we were sick of academic politics &/or we saw the funds drying up and didn't want to do 2 (3 or 4) post-docs. You'll find a lot of us in clinical research both in hospitals and industry - the pay, benefits and hours are better (much better).
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Wow! Note also that the Spanish male researchers only had to be 1/3 as productive as the other European contestants!
#: Posted by on 07/14 at 05:38 PM
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This is arts, not science, but a lecturer of mine once cited a similar study to the one mentioned by Alon. It was an English study, and I'm not sure what year it was done, but it showed a difference between male and female teachers. Not a very large difference, but enough to be significant. They both discriminated, yes but in slightly different ways in respect to the averaging (bell curve) of marks. I'll try track it down.
As a consequance, we submitted all our work for the year under our randomly assigned student numbers. They were even given back to us by a department administrator, rather than the lecturer. Coincidentally, the highest marks I've ever had were in that subject. It was about pirates.
I also agree with his statement abut Engineering departments - it's a nasty cycle. There aren't many women there, so it becomes a insular atmosphere, so not many women go there, so it deters others... I did a few computer engineering type subjects, not too long ago, but found it trying being the only girl. It's intimidating when you're the only "other" in a room.#: Posted by the amazing kim on 07/15 at 08:05 AM -
They absorb it - but why should they behave so similarily? If they (the females) reflect on it, that is.
I am thinking of two more reasons:
1) The females have to behave as the males to keep being accepted. Peer pressure and discrimination blended; and another feedback mechanism in the system.
2) Discriminated groups has been said to tend to be even more discriminating towards themselves, I think. Using the practise with a vengeance to be more acceptable themselves, if I understand it correctly. But I never understood if that mechanism has really been observed.
These sorts of systems are nasty since feedback mechanisms like those we discussed naturally tend to make even bad systems stable and selfperpetuating. I support the efforts to reform (rebuild) the system wholeheartedly!#: Posted by on 07/15 at 09:49 AM -
Hej, Torbjorn! (inte "Torbjörn"?)
2) Discriminated groups has been said to tend to be even more discriminating towards themselves, I think. Using the practise with a vengeance to be more acceptable themselves, if I understand it correctly. But I never understood if that mechanism has really been observed.
Two examples, although I am not equating them--one is from the milder end of the spectrum, and the other from the more horrific end.
1) When I was growing up in Alabama, my grandmother always lectured me not to beat the boys at games, or to show them that I was smarter than they were, because then they wouldn't like me. She wasn't telling me this to sabotage me (although it did), but because she genuinely wanted me to fit into society so I could be happy (by her measure).
2) In those societies that practice female circumcision, usually it is the mothers, grandmothers, and aunts that bring the little girls for the operation, and often women who perform it. It is not that they don't love their girls--they do very much. They just have been taught that the consequences of not performing the operation are worse than the operation, and so--taken from that viewpoint--doing this to the girls is a rational action taken to maximize their happiness.
I think these actions are related in intention and mechanism, although certainly not in degree. The women who do inculcate female submission in their daughters are neither irrational, nor do they fail to love their girls--they just believe that this is the best way to promote their happiness. -
Hej, Raven!
I think you have my number - have you visited Sweden? Yes, it's Torbjörn, but the site can't use 'ö' in the 'Name:' box. Maybe I will invent a web handle too - I guess I have writer's block right now, too much ambition here and too much examples there.
Thank you for the examples! I can see how it works.
Yes, example 2) is an horrendous practise. Human mutilation, especially on kids, is one of the few things that can make me cry. It is forbidden (on females) here, but it seems some families do it anyway, or send their daughters abroad to get it done. Information is the key, as you say.
About 1) I am glad to see that you have recovered!#: Posted by on 07/15 at 01:05 PM -
Steve asked the same question as me at about the same time. My impression, for what it is worth, is that the US does suffer from a good deal of sexism, although whether more or less than Europe I couldn't say. I can contribute one minor piece of data concerning the question: When I was an undergraduate one of my professors made the statement that women spoke less often in class than men. He did not give any evidence to back this statement, however. Therefore, being a good little nerdling, I set about to test the hypothesis. I counted the number of women and men in each of my classes and kept track of the number of times someone of either gender spoke and whether the person volunteered to answer a question or was specifically asked by the professor to answer the question. (To avoid influencing the results, I didn't volunteer in any of the classes I studied, nor was I ever asked to speak.) The results were interesting: Men and women spoke about equally often. However, when a professor asked a particular person to speak on an issue, that person was about twice as likely to be a man as a woman. I repeated the survey in medical school with the same results. My conclusion was that women did speak as often as men but that men were more likely to be noticed by the professors. Of course, the data are very close to anecdote, so I wouldn't want to try to draw too many conclusions from them.
That's fascinating. Especially since it appears to contradict the conventional wisdom which says that when the girls speak 30% of the time in a class people think they speak as often as the boys. At least that is what I have heard from people who are active feminists here in Sweden.#: Posted by on 07/18 at 04:04 AM - The question for an economist or sociologist, if the 2.5 times more productivity is required to achieve the same reward wouldn't the market do more than just discourage women from becoming scientists? Wouldn't it enrich for women who look at the "cost" of being a scientist differently than the average science graduate student? If you told most people they would have to work 2.5 times harder to get the same reward, most people would find something else to do. Especially given it is not a cake walk being a research faculty member to begin with.
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It's not as if the women have been told up front with supporting spreadsheet and evidence that they'll have to work 2.5 times for the same reward! Sure they are discouraged and patronised all along the way but it isn't actually laid out as a set of figures. The having to work twice as hard was always more of a joke/rumour. Not only do the figures have to be collected before anyone can look at them, like now, but there's a general aura of secrecy and denial about these things.
It's a secret so that the men in power can maintain the lie that the women aren't as good and reap the benefits of their work by ripping them off (eg with DNA). The (self)denial is so that the not quite so scummy men can still feel good about themselves while practising the discrimination (pre-arranged apologetics save on apologies and law-suits). Even if the facts and figures were further publicised now, there would still be some women who would take up science - for the science itself! The publicised fact that the prizes for women's tennis are deliberately set lower doesn't actually stop there being women in tennis.#: Posted by on 07/23 at 06:06 PM