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Gender and societies: a grassroots approach to women in science.

ABSTRACT: Women are under-represented in science. We show that the extent of the gender gap varies depending on the status of the position in question and there are simple steps that can be taken to improve diversity. We analyse data on the activities of over 30 science societies spanning four countries and five distinct discipline areas. Our results show that women tend to be equally represented in lower status roles and awards, e.g. student prizes and editorships, but under-represented in higher status roles, e.g. late-career awards and chief editorships. We develop a simple mathematical model to explore the role of homophily in decision making and quantify the effect of simple steps that can be taken to improve diversity. We conclude that, when the stakes are low, efforts to tackle historic gender bias towards men have been at least partially successful, but when the stakes are higher male dominance is often still the norm.

SUBMITTER: James A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6774970 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Gender and societies: a grassroots approach to women in science.

James Alex A Chisnall Rose R Plank Michael J MJ

Royal Society open science 20190904 9

Women are under-represented in science. We show that the extent of the gender gap varies depending on the status of the position in question and there are simple steps that can be taken to improve diversity. We analyse data on the activities of over 30 science societies spanning four countries and five distinct discipline areas. Our results show that women tend to be equally represented in lower status roles and awards, e.g. student prizes and editorships, but under-represented in higher status ...[more]

PMID: 31598298

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Project description:Based on Social Cognitive Career Theory principles, the present study sought to investigate whether stereotype threat experiences could act as a barrier and reduce the persistence of women in math-intensive activities. More specifically, we assessed whether the experimental activation of stereotypes about women's lower math capabilities affected the performance, persistence, and self-selected difficulty of engineering students in a math task which required sustained effort. We also evaluated the relationships between these effects and the participants' pre-testing gender-science stereotypes and math self-concept. A sample of 340 engineering students (175 and 165 self-identified as males and females, respectively) were recruited and randomly assigned to a control (Con) or stereotype threat (StA) condition to form four similarly sized groups. All participants rated their self-concept in four academic domains (math, chemistry, physics, and coding), completed the gender-science Implicit Association Test, and a "reading comprehension task" that served to promote the stereotype threat manipulation immediately before facing a modified version of the Math Effort Task (M-MET). We observed that, in the control condition, M-MET performance, self-selected difficulty, and persistence were similar in female and male participants, independent of their gender-science implicit stereotypes but correlated to their math self-concept scores. In contrast, the StA condition triggered opposite effects in female and male students, so they showed decreased/enhanced M-MET performance and self-selected difficulty, respectively. This experimental condition also resulted in enhanced persistence of the male students without affecting the number of trials completed by female students. These effects were correlated with the strength of the participants' gender-science implicit stereotypes but not with their math self-concept scores. In fact, as revealed by finer-grain analyses, stereotype threat only had a significant impact on individuals harboring stereotypical gender-science implicit associations. Therefore, it is concluded that: (1) stereotypes can promote differences between male and female engineering students in their performance, self-confidence, and persistence in math-related activities; (2) These effects seem to be more prominent in individuals implicitly perceiving science as a masculine domain. The relevance of these findings to explain women's enhanced abandonment rates of math-intensive studies is discussed.

Dataset Information

Gender and societies: a grassroots approach to women in science.

Publications

Gender and societies: a grassroots approach to women in science.

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