14,000 academic articles have been written about the “leaky pipeline.”[28] However, while the phrase is also very popular with the media and politicians, it is a flawed metaphor. Although it is often used in connection with a perceived future shortage of scientists, it is less commonly used to show the need for increased diversity and equitable representation in STEM, the more important pressing problem. At the same time, a leaky, dripping pipeline has the obvious negative connotations of a dysfunctional pipe; it implies that there is a single direct pathway from preschool to PhD, and that the PhD is a more valuable endpoint than other educational degrees.[29] Although the leaky pipeline is not necessarily a good metaphor, it certainly describes something real. Therefore, I use the phrase in this chapter, although I place it in quotes to acknowledge its inadequacy.
The percentages of women decrease from a bachelor’s degree to a PhD, tenure, full professorship, and major awards in the sciences. A 2015 NSF report shows that women accounted for 45 percent of PhDs in the STEM fields. The percentage falls to 42 percent for female junior faculty members and to 30 percent for female senior faculty members.[30] A similar drop-off is observed in biotech companies, where women just hold 20 percent of leadership roles and 10 percent of board seats. Chemistry & Engineering News reviewed the boards of 75 biotech companies that had raised series A funding since 2016 and found that 39 have only men on their boards, while just 2 have boards with over 30 percent women.[31]
There are numerous reasons for the decrease in the percentage of women in more senior positions and receiving major awards. The remainder of this chapter divides them into three main categories: (1) a structure (PhD, tenure, funding, and publication) that is not compatible with a family life; (2) implicit biases against women by other scientists (both men and women); and (3) a system that favors men and masculine confidence.
Science and a Family Life
The easy and convenient explanation for the low numbers of women in the upper levels of science is that they have more family responsibilities . Many will even argue that this is a fait accompli and that nothing can be done about it. I disagree. Some of the differences may be due to family reasons, but with proper incentives these differences can be made negligible, and there are other, more significant factors that cause women to exit the pipeline. If family issues are the only problem, why have the last 30–40 years seen such great improvements in gender diversity (and even racial diversity) in the life sciences, while the physical sciences, computer science, and engineering have lagged behind? Physics and astronomy require very similar skills, yet astronomy has twice the percentage of women faculty as physics.[32]
A study of gender diversity in the life sciences sector in Massachusetts was conducted by Liftstream and MassBio, in which over 900 people working in the biotech sector were surveyed. The 2017 report found that women have career breaks more often than men, related not just to parenthood but also to caring for elderly parents. More important, the researchers found that parenthood isn’t the only cause for the “leaky pipeline.” In fact, more women leave the biotech sector because they are opting out of the corporate culture than for parenting reasons.[33]
Patricia Fara is the president of the British Society for the History of Science and a fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. She has an undergraduate degree in physics from Oxford but is one of the many who leaked out of the “pipeline.” In a February 2018 National Public Radio interview, she talked about why she had dropped out of the system. For her it was a choice between quality of life and status. To succeed in science and academia routinely requires a 24/7 commitment. Fara feels that she and many other women have wisely opted for a better quality of life and that “perhaps in time, the really smart men will realize that’s a better option than earning more money but having no time to spend it.”[34] She might be right that faculty at the elite institutions have little or no life outside of work and that getting tenure requires extraordinary sacrifices, especially in one’s family life. Progressive policies such as paid parental leave, high-quality, on-site child care, and tenure ‘clock stops” will improve the quality of living of STEM faculty and make STEM careers more appealing to new generations, but they won’t completely close the gender gap.
In their aptly titled paper “Do Babies Matter? The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women,” Mason and Goulden have shown that women with children don’t advance any slower than women without children. That doesn’t mean having babies doesn’t matter; it matters a great deal. The study showed that there is large gap in achieving tenure between women and men who have babies within five years of getting their PhDs. But most important, based on all the data in their study, Mason and Goulden conclude that “babies are not completely responsible for the gender gap, and that there are other factors at work, perhaps including the thousand paper cuts of discrimination.”[35] Most of these “paper cuts” are a result of implicit bias. They are unconscious, involuntary, natural, and unavoidable assumptions that all of us make on the basis of subconscious assumptions, preferences, and stereotypes.
Implicit Bias
Gender disparities are decreasing in academia. However, many biases and gender inequities remain. This section looks at some of these “paper cuts.” Frances Trix and Carolyn Psenka of Wayne State University examined 300 letters of recommendation for medical faculty. They found significant differences between letters written for men and women. The average length of letters for female applicants was 227 words, whereas the average length of letters for male applicants was 253 words. Not only are the letters for women shorter, they also use descriptors such as “determined” and “dependable” more often and “outstanding” and “brilliant” less often than the equivalent letters for men. Letters for women are more likely to mention family situations and personal characteristics. And here is the kicker: it makes no difference whether the letters are written by men or women.[36]
The peer-review publishing model that the scientific publication system is based on is a single-blind process. Upon receiving a manuscript, a journal editor sends it to external reviewers with expertise in the research area. The reviewers know the identity of the authors, but the reviewers remain anonymous. They read the paper, recommend whether it should be published or not, and identify what changes are needed to make the paper acceptable if it is not quite ready for publication. To examine reviewer bias, Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, Carroll Glynn, and Michael Huge of Ohio State University[37] recruited graduate students to rate conference abstracts authored by researchers with distinctively male or female names. The fake author identities on the abstracts were varied such that the same abstract would be attributed to a male-sounding name or a female-sounding name in a given test. Scientific abstracts submitted by “male” authors were considered of higher scientific quality than those submitted by authors with feminine names even though there was no difference in content. The gender of the reviewers did not influence these patterns. The differences were small but statistically significant. I am confident the same implicit biases appear when papers or presentations indicate that a work was done at a lesser ranked institution or in a developing country, or if the author has a foreign last name. Bias in peer review can affect the publication record of young scientists and impact their chances for promotion and tenure, a painful paper cut indeed.
The reviewing biases discussed here are not limited to graduate students. In 2012, Jo Handelsman and coworkers at Yale University showed that faculty at research-intensive universities favor male students. In a randomized double-blind study, 127 science faculty rated the application materials of a student, randomly assigned either a male or a female name, for a laboratory manager position. They found that “faculty participants rated the male applicant as significantly more competent and hireable than the (identical) female applicant. These participants also selected a higher starting salary and offered more career mentoring to the male applicant. The gender of the faculty participants did not affect responses, such that female and male faculty were equally likely to exhibit bias against the female student.”[38]
