RESUMEN
We use data from 30 countries and find that the more women in a discipline, the lower quality the research in that discipline is evaluated to be and the lower the funding success rate is. This affects men and women, and is robust to age, number of research outputs, and bibliometric measures where such data are available. Our work builds on others' findings that women's work is valued less, regardless of who performs that work.
There have been growing concerns around sexism in science. Studies have found that women in science are often paid less, are less likely to get credit for their work and receive fewer and smaller grants than men at similar stages in their careers. This can make it harder for women to advance in their careers, resulting in less women than men taking up positions of leadership. There are also gender imbalances between scientific disciplines, with a higher proportion of women working in some fields compared to others. Here, James et al. set out to find whether having more women working in a discipline leads to biases in how the research is evaluated. The team examined four datasets which included information on the research evaluations and funding success of thousands of researchers across 30 different countries. The analysis suggested that scientists working in women-dominated disciplines were less likely to succeed in their grant applications. Their research was also often evaluated as being lower quality compared to researchers working in fields dominated by men. These biases applied to both men and women working in these disciplines. There were not sufficient data to analyse patterns faced by non-binary individuals. The study by James et al. cannot pinpoint a specific cause for these outcomes. However, it suggests that funding organisations should analyse the pattern of successful applications across disciplines and consider taking steps to ensure all disciplines have similar success rates. James et al. also propose that when hiring or making promotions, scientific institutions should take care when comparing researchers across disciplines and ensure there is no built-in assumption that fields dominated by men are intrinsically better.
Asunto(s)
Bibliometría , Humanos , Femenino , Masculino , Apoyo a la Investigación como Asunto , Factores Sexuales , Investigación Biomédica/economía , Investigación/economía , Investigadores/economía , Investigadores/estadística & datos numéricosRESUMEN
The gender and ethnicity pay gaps are well publicised for academics. The majority of research relies on observations representing a point in time or uses models to consider a standard academic lifespan. We use a stochastic mathematical model to ask what drives differences in lifetime earnings of university academics and highlight a new question: how best should we quantify a working lifetime? The model observes and accounts for patterns in age when entering and leaving the workforce, and differing salary trajectories during an academic career. It is parameterized with data from a national dataset in Aotearoa New Zealand. We compare the total lifetime earnings of different gender and ethnicity groups with and without accounting for the different lengths of time spent in academia. The lifetime earnings gaps are considerably larger when we account for different hiring and leaving ages. We find that overall, for every ethnicity, women have shorter careers and are more likely to leave academia. All minority ethnic groups-and women-earn considerably less than their male white, European colleagues.