Headlines like “It’s Still Hard for Women in Science,” “Read The Nasty Comments Women In Science Deal With Daily,” and “Sexism in paleontology is so bad female scientists are donning fake beards” paint a nightmarish picture for women in science.
But a new academic paper from Ivy League academics challenges this narrative.
The study, published in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, reveals female scientists are approaching parity with their male counterparts — and in some cases actually have a leg up on their competition.
“Just as there are negative consequences of not acknowledging bias, there are also costs of believing that sexism in academic science is pervasive when it is not — key among them that women will be discouraged from choosing academic careers in science,” the report argues.
Husband and wife professors Stephen Ceci and Wendy Williams of Cornell University and Boston University professor Shulamit Kahn spent five years pouring over hundreds of studies on gender differences to determine how female scientists fared in six important metrics.
They found women have reached parity with their male coworkers on measures like the quality of recommendation letters, funding for grant proposals, and getting published in academic journals.
And yet the mainstream narrative, they say, hasn’t caught up to this reality.
Television depictions of female scientists aren’t all that rosy, like The Big Bang Theory’s token female scientist Amy, whose male scientist pals made some serious workplace faux pas— like telling a female lab assistant she was lagging behind because she’s “full of eggs” or inviting a female scientist to a meeting in a bathtub.
Even premier scientific journals like Nature and Science continue to publish claims of widespread and systemic gender discrimination that the meta-analysis calls into question.
“We see these very strong claims over and over and over again that women are at a huge disadvantage,” Ceci told The Post. “Usually we found that the gloom and doom messages were not accurate, and they didn’t accord with the scientific evidence.”
Kahn says this gloomy narrative could be deterring would-be female scientists: “I think that is discouraging women actually, because it seems the perception is, ‘Oh my God, it’s all sexist.’”
In fact, by some metrics, the reality is perhaps the opposite. The researchers discovered female scientists have a “substantial” advantage over their male counterparts when it comes to tenure-track hiring.
“The findings showed actually not a level playing field but a big hiring advantage for women if they have the exact same credentials as men,” Williams told The Post.
One important place where women do still fall behind, however, is pay.
After controlling for variables like family leave, hours worked, years at a job, and field of work, the team estimated a 3.5% to 4% salary gap between male and female scientists — roughly 5 times smaller than widely reported claims.
And while the gap has closed by 80 percent over the past several decades, there is still progress to be made.
“Although gender gaps in salary were much smaller than often claimed, that’s concerning because if you accumulate it over a 35-year career, a 3.5 to 4% salary difference is significant,” Ceci noted.
The analysis’s three co-authors are an unlikely pairing, as the trio doesn’t exactly see eye to eye. In fact, they have published contradictory findings on how pervasive gender discrimination in STEM is over the past several decades.
But their differences, they say, helped reduce their paper’s bias.
“There are people on the two sides of this issue and the author team represents both of those sides,” Ceci said. “It wasn’t easy, but we were all pledged to being open-minded and guided by the scientific evidence.”
One thing Williams and Kahn certainly agree on is that they’ve seen tremendous strides toward equality over the course of their careers as women in science
“I see more awareness, and I see more representation,” Kahn said.
Williams, 63, says when she was starting her career in the 1980s women were “relegated to helping roles and basically asked to do the secretarial work” while male scientists “were more the ideas people who got to do the exciting work.”
“The progress has been monumental,” she added.
And yet just 28% of the STEM workforce is female — something the authors agree must change.
The way to close the gap, they argue, is to emphasize and celebrate the progress women in science have made.
“When young women see the message constantly that it’s just a terrible situation, they decide not to go into science because they feel that it’s not a hospitable place for them,” Williams said.
“We’re driving women out of it before they even enter the fields.”
