nd are less likely than men to expect their spouses to make career sacrifices on their behalf. For Rice, rather than a real choice, much of this apparent self-selection is down to female trainees acting on the messages they receive. “Maybe these women have gone through the PhD process, experienced the effects of implicit bias, realised they’re held out of various important networks and that there are few women among their role models, and they take the consequences of that," he says.
The authors dismiss the notion that any gap in applicant quality could be behind the gender gap in elite labs—something that might seem obvious, but is important to stress as the question is still asked, says Rice. The paper highlights that not only do elite women PIs employ as many female trainees as other female professors, but at graduate level women and men win equal numbers of competitive fellowships from agencies such as the US National Science Foundation. “Once again, this study shows that quality alone is not the sole criterion for hiring people,” says Rice.
The underrepresentation of women in science slows the progress of discovery by artificially excluding people who have the ability to make significant contributions, adds Sheltzer. “There may be more of a need for male principal investigators to reach out and collaborate with these talented women, at talks, conferences and interviews, and bring them in to work in their lab.”
This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on July 1 , 2014.