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Monday, March 18, 2024
March 18, 2024

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Study says genius fields dominated by males

The Columbian
Published:

The difference between Sherlock Holmes and Hermione Granger may help explain why women don’t thrive as much as men in some fields of academia. One is brilliant by nature and the other has to work her butt off, and they represent the pervasive gender stereotypes of our age.

Surprise, surprise: There’s a gender gap in most academic fields, with men taking more advanced degrees in subjects such as computer science and physics. A study published Thursday in Science suggests that the fields that favor men — in both the sciences and the humanities — have one cultural bias in common. They value innate brilliance over hard work and dedication. Unfortunately, that spark of brilliance is a trait that’s stereotypically assigned to white men above all others.

Researchers surveyed more than 1,800 academics from 30 different disciplines and found that the value of brilliance (a spark of genius in the field, if you will) was a better predictor for under-representation of women in that field than any other hypothesis tested.

In addition to giving weight to their own hypothesis, the researchers were able to knock out some popular explanations for gender gaps by comparison: That women shy away from fields that require more hours of work, that women don’t make the cut in fields where only the top percentile of students are successful, and that women are less likely to choose fields that require analytical thinking than men are.

And the same held true when researchers applied the test to African-American representation, indicating that this bias for “brilliance” may keep those individuals out of such fields as well.

Different fields

The study was led by two researchers in very different academic fields with very different gender gaps. Sarah-Jane Leslie, a philosophy professor at Princeton, collaborated with University of Illinois psychology professor Andrei Cimpian on several projects before the new study came to be.

These two fields are a great example of how complex gender inequality in academia is. It would be simple to say that women favor the humanities and men favor the sciences, but that’s not true. Some scientific fields, like molecular biology and neuroscience, have achieved gender parity. And some fields in the social sciences and humanities, like economics and philosophy, favor men heavily.

Cimpian and Leslie frequently discussed issues of gender in their fields. Psychology seemed to embrace women, with female researchers earning 70 percent of all PhDs in the field. But in philosophy, less than 35 percent of such degrees went to women.

Marked differences in the cultures of their disciplines came up a lot, too. Philosophy praised innate brilliance but psychology emphasized hard work and study.

“At some point, we were at a conference and these two ideas finally came together,” Cimpian said. What if fields that idolized brilliance were favoring men and scaring women away as a result? “After we mustered up the courage to actually do the study, we tested this idea empirically. The magnitude and strength of the relationship came as a surprise.”

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